Bookpedia Forgetting or Deleting Data?

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peterc99
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Bookpedia Forgetting or Deleting Data?

Post by peterc99 »

Is there a known bug or circumstance under which Bookpedia will lose, forget, or otherwise delete data randomly? I recently went through and added the Pages for 200+ books where I had apparently forgotten to enter the page count when I first added them to the Bookpedia database. While doing so, I also updated Publisher data, LLC, Dewey, and a few other fields. I finished last night and ran another sort to make sure I didn't miss any. To my surprise, another 200 or so books showed up with Pages, Publisher, etc. all missing. Several are books for which I KNOW I entered this information; in fact, a few were on the original list and updated by me within the last week or so.

[I'm running Bookpedia 5.6.1 with a database of around 2900 books; macOS High Sierra version 10.13.5, iMac 21.5-inch, Late 2015, with 2.8 GHz i5 processor. I also sync my database with Pocketpedia on an iPhone 7 and iPad mini.]
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Conor
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Re: Bookpedia Forgetting or Deleting Data?

Post by Conor »

Thank you for the extensive detail and information. Sorry to hear about the discrepancy.

There is no known bug. Bookpedia is designed so that forgetting data is hard to do. There is no method for it, that is not explicitly the delete key. After each edit, when you close the edit window or remove focus from the table view that data is written out to disk. The most likely culprit is the database is changing behind Bookpedia's back to an earlier version. Is the database in the default place or on the cloud, Dropbox or iCloud?

Since you are running 10.13, do also jump on the public beta that has many fixes for 10.13 that are not compatible with 10.11, and hence are only in the beta for now. You can rename the beta and use it like your normal version. Getting near release, and the more users using it the better. Also make sure you have only one version of Bookpedia (having also version 4, might also make it look like info is disappearing as they both use different database files).

The only other likely place for a bug would be in merging data from Pocketpedia. But pocketpedia keeps a log of items edited in Pocketpedia and only checks those explicit books on bringing data into Bookpedia. Since I doubt you have edited 200 books in Pocketpedia, I assume it's unlikely the bug would be with the merging of the data there.

To cover al the possible bugs, could you have a look at your console log, see if there are any messages from Bookpedia? You can access the console log via the application 'Console', located inside your Applications/Utilities. The newer messages are towards the end of the log. You can also filter the log by "Bookpedia" on the top right. Any minor issue would be logged by Bookpedia into this log.
peterc99
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Re: Bookpedia Forgetting or Deleting Data?

Post by peterc99 »

I'll try to address all your queries as succinctly as I can.

I've never moved the Bookpedia database, so I assume it's in the default place on my hard drive. I did a quick search and verified that I have only one version of the Bookpedia app on my computer. Did a quick check in Console but didn't find any Bookpedia errors in the log.

I grabbed the public beta as you recommended. I'll run that for a while and see what happens.

Thank you very much for the quick and helpful reply!
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