All changes saved to file lost after reinstalling app [solved]

[ogdredweary]

Sorry, not sure how to better title this problem. After a number of other issues I’ve been experiencing with the iPad app, I decided to try uninstalling and reinstalling the app. The file I had been working with is stored in iCloud and was not deleted when I uninstalled the app; however, upon reinstalling the app I discovered that absolutely none of the edits and changes that I saved to the document from inside the app were saved to the file itself. In fact, some of the changes to the master pages that I had made to the file on the Mac desktop app are gone now, too. Hours of work wasted. The iPad app is wholly unreliable in its present state.

 

Since I’ve posted several times over the past few days, here is the sequence of events in one place:

1. Install Publisher 2 (2.0.1)

2. Work on current project

3. Experience crashing but otherwise all is well, changes are saving

4. Experience new bug where only some changes are saving, crashing becomes more of a problem

5. Update Publisher 2 to 2.0.2

6. Erratic saving and crashing problems become worse

7. Post bug report in forum

8. Receive suggestion to update iPad Pro to iPadOS 16 (been intending to anyway) and do that

9. Publisher 2 fonts broken, document in shambles

10. Post another bug report

11. Test some of the included sample documents, all fonts there broken as well

12. Uninstall and reinstall app

13. Reopen file been working on for the past couple weeks to find all changes and edits lost

14. Post this bug report

Edited November 24, 2022 by ogdredweary
Solved

[walt.farrell]

You didn't say anything in there about when you Saved your file, and where you Saved it. That will be important in explaining how changes/edits were lost.

[Paul Mudditt]

Do not keep your completed work in the iPad sandbox/home screen, always save to a folder structure you created in a cloud service AND close the open document in the sandbox. The sandbox is only a temporary location for work in progress so that undo/redo history can be quickly accessed.

A document in the sand box is IDENTICAL to a document in a tab on a desktop app.

You would not force close or re-install a desktop app without saving your current edits to disk, the same is true of the iPad.

[ogdredweary]

15 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You didn't say anything in there about when you Saved your file, and where you Saved it. That will be important in explaining how changes/edits were lost.

When I saved it? Constantly. Every little bit of progress I made was immediately proceeded by a save, roughly every 20-30 minutes. On 2.0.1, I was saving from inside the document via the menu. On 2.0.2, I was saving from outside the document (and a few times from within the document with CMD+S keyboard shortcut). I’m not sure what you mean by where I saved it. It was stored in iCloud, opened from iCloud, and presumably saved to iCloud because where else would the changes be saved if not to the file that was open and being worked on? From the app, I tapped the Open icon and navigated to the file location in my iCloud Drive. This is the only document I’ve been working on. After the uninstall/reinstall, I repeated the process and opened the same file again to find all my work lost. In another post, I saw someone had mentioned that they save locally, which made me wonder if there was a way around using Live Docs, but I couldn’t figure out if that’s what they actually meant.

[ogdredweary]

3 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

Do not keep your completed work in the iPad sandbox/home screen, always save to a folder structure you created in a cloud service AND close the open document in the sandbox. The sandbox is only a temporary location for work in progress so that undo/redo history can be quickly accessed.

A document in the sand box is IDENTICAL to a document in a tab on a desktop app.

You would not force close or re-install a desktop app without saving your current edits to disk, the same is true of the iPad.

I constantly saved my work. Are you telling me that the save button inside the app only saves to the sandbox? If so, how was I ever meant to save directly to the file that I had open? I never saw another way to save changes.

[Paul Mudditt]

1 minute ago, ogdredweary said:

I constantly saved my work. Are you telling me that the save button inside the app only saves to the sandbox? If so, how was I ever meant to save directly to the file that I had open? I never saw another way to save changes.

Save should save outside but depending upon the exact steps you took the file may have been saved in the OnMyiPad folder if that was set as your default save location.

Unfortunately IOS deletes folders in that location automatically if you delete the related app.

Hence why I say always use a folder structure that you created so that you are in control.

This is especially relevant if you move between Mac and iPad, to make sure you always close the file on one device before opening on the other device whether going from Mac to iPad or iPad to Mac via a cloud service.

[ogdredweary]

Okay, so it turns out there had been a duplicate of the file, one where changes had been saved and another where no changes had been saved. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but I’m just glad that all my hours of work are not actually lost. Maybe it’s just me being much more accustomed to desktop apps, but I don’t find the iPad app at all intuitive. 

How can I marked this problem solved? Unfortunately, the other bugs I previously reported are still a problem, but I can at least move to my Mac and pick up where I left off. 

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, ogdredweary said:

How can I marked this problem solved?

You could edit the first post and add [Solved] to the title. (Or long click on the topic title, if you're using a desktop browser.)

[DM1]

5 hours ago, ogdredweary said:

Okay, so it turns out there had been a duplicate of the file, one where changes had been saved and another where no changes had been saved. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but I’m just glad that all my hours of work are not actually lost.

Any time you open a file (xx.afpub), Publisher will create a sandbox copy of that file. The sandbox copy is what you see in Live Docs and is what actually gets edited and updated by autosave. None of these edits are copied back to the xx.afpub file until you tap 'Save'. In the initial release there was an option to rename files. This in fact only renamed the sandbox working copy of the file. Now you have a xx.afpub file with one name and sandbox copy of the same file with another name. Fortunately this option has now been removed. You can still make copies of the sandboxed file. Ideally the sandbox copy remains linked to the external file version but with changing file names, duplicates of Live Docs and sharing a file in iCloud, it’s important to be certain you are working on the right Live Doc.

When you use Save as, the original Live doc is closed without updating its associated xx.afpub file and a new Live Doc is created with a new xx.afpub file that does include the edits. Unless you save prior to Saving As the old doc will not retain the edits, only the new one.

Yep, it confusing. At least till you understand how it works,🤪🤔