I’ve posted before about having data vanish temporarily. Today Agenda crashed and when I came back in, many of the notebooks were blank (and I have a lot of notes in each of them). I restarted and my notes reappeared. But there was a moment of great alarm. It may have been just a display issue, but I think we as users that are investing ourselves in using this app need re-assurance that in the case of data loss from the app, there would be some way to recover our data.
Can you add some function to back up data locally on the mac at regular intervals or manually. What would you have been able to do for me if the notes did not re-appear?
That is definitely a display glitch. Restarting the app should fix that.
In terms of a backup, I recommend Apple’s built in backup: Time Machine. If you have that turned on, it also backs up your Agenda data, and all other data.
Note that if you have the sync for Agenda turned on, with iCloud Drive also turned on, Agenda does put a copy of the data in the cloud. This could work as a backup if needed, though it wasn’t really intended for that purpose.
We don’t have any built in backup, because Apple already backs up all the data on your device to iCloud. We also have iCloud sync, which acts as a kind of backup: if you device were to be stolen or broken, you could install a new device, sign in to iCloud, and it would sync up the data you had.
Note you can also export: swipe a project, and tap the … button to see a Share… button. Export in Agenda File format and you have a duplicate of the project. If you were paranoid about backups, that might be a a way to ‘snapshot’.
The issue with your situation (iOS only) is if there is a bug in the system and the data get corrupted or overwritten or deleted. The ‘backup’ is going to be corrupted at that point too. Isn’t it?
If the backup were to run after the corruption, yes.
With macOS, Time Machine keeps a history of backups, so you would be safer in that case, ie, could go back to before any corruption.
I guess this applies to all apps, and any app on your phone. If there is a corruption, you do have a problem. The iCloud sync provides a bit more piece of mind in that case.
If you are really worried about it, I would recommend using the export I mentioned to regularly put important projects into Dropbox or a similar file system.
Yes, you can export but not as agenda file format. So there would be no way to bring them back in except manually. Export/Import Agenda would do the trick. And that ould also make it possible to share.with others that have agenda.
Your use of the words “Apple already backs up” is a little misleading to me. Corruption starts with any particular iDevice (if there’s more than one )and that corruption is synced to the Cloud. From the Cloud it is then propogated to each other iDevice, as Agenda is opened on that iDevice. So in my understanding their is no Apple “backup”. Agenda needs to provide a full app sequential export/backup option of the app to the Files app, not one to export Project by Project.
It depends on what type of corruption it is. The most common type I have seen is simply that a file on the disk is messed up (eg hard disk failure or an untimely crash). In that case, the file simply is unreadable and the app crashes. It would be unusual for this type of corruption to propagate to other devices, because the sync would generally not ever succeed to begin with.
Other types of corruption are possible, of course, and there would be cases where it was possible that the corruption spread. Hopefully these are rare, and an iCloud backup or Time Machine backup can help you.
iCloud sync will be on if you go into the Settings app or System Preferences (macOS), and into the iCloud section, and…
You are signed into iCloud
iCloud Drive is turned on
If you manager the apps, Agenda is allowed to use iCloud (should be the default)
There are no files kept in iCloud. We use a different storage tech called CloudKit, which is more like a database in the cloud. You can’t directly access the data, and it wouldn’t make sense to do that, because it is in a very convoluted unreadable form.
You can certainly import the files that you export, yes. It isn’t sync though. It is just a snapshot of the notes at one point in time. If you import it again, it will create duplicate notes. It won’t merge into the existing ones.
As I work more and more with Agenda, I’m getting a little worried too about backup
I work on the Mac, and have TimeMachine, so OK, my data is safe somewhere.
But… the Agenda library is not visible for us; and, when you want to use TimeMachine to recover something (I’ve already used it and it’s great !! thanks TimeMachine…) you follow the different directories and look for your files through time.
But if you can’t localise the directories… how could you make the files revive ? Is there a special tutorial for the case of our Agenda library would be corrupted ? (and all the linked files… we can access their directories one by one, but only via Agenda, not by the Finder).
The way an app like Agenda has to sync data through the cloud makes it difficult to keep the data human-readable.
The good news is that Agenda keeps a history of your changes, which means we can go back in time if something should go wrong. We have tools for that, but they are not particularly user friendly, so we only give them out if something really does go wrong and we are helping with corrupted data or something like that.
A Time Machine backup is a great idea. If you ever run into an issue, and can’t fix it, you can contact us for help.
Note that the cloud sync data is also a type of backup. If a device should break, you should be able to get your data back simply by syncing to a new device.
You can also make manual backups. Here is how (macOS)…
Click on Finder, and choose Go > Go to Folder
Enter ~/Library/Group Containers
Find WRBK2Z2EG7.group.com.momenta.agenda.macos
Select it and choose Edit > Copy
Go to your backup location, select the folder, and choose Edit > Paste
I don’t synchronize to a cloud anymore, because I keep all my important files directly in Agenda (the easiest way…) and it takes too much space on cloud and too much time to synchronize if I do it. I’m on the way to more digital sobriety so I’m removing more and more things from the cloud, even if it was very convenient.
I think the easiest is to call you if I’ve got a big issue, before doing more mess trying to get back things from TimeMachine. it’s great with ordinary folders, but with folders whose we don’t see everything… I would be afraid to erase everything instead of recovering !
Is it safe to backup this when Agenda is running? I use Arq Backup for hourly backups.
If not, I‘d love to be able to activate an automatic export of the data in Agenda‘s own format, so I can use Arq Backup for this. As more and more important data is stored in my Agenda database, I prefer to keep the data safe somewhere else in addition to the usual iCloud sync.
