ALL MY ARTICLES HAVE VANISHED

[Slyths]

Please, help, help, help, help, help and help urgently.

I... just opened my TA and all my articles including archives have gone. The only thing remaining are my dictionaries. Oh! no, that can't be. Those are months of hard work, and a lot of times working through sleepless nights copying and editing. Oh! I'm doomed.

I just finished some task last night, all was fine but just... I also can't remember deleting anything by myself.
I use 3.72 version.

[blake31]

I suggest first of all that you update to TA 3.0.73, which is the most recent version. After doing that, go to TextAloud options, article options. See if "Limit number of articles loaded to one single article mode" is selected/checked.

[Slyths]

Thank you, Blake for the kind response.

I tried all that but no success. I have even followed the Data Folder in the User Local directory but no success.

[Jim Bretti]

Slyths - I'm very sorry to hear that this happened. When this happened, were both the Archive and Articles folders empty? Were the folders themselves deleted?

The only thing I can think of that will delete articles from the archive is the option on Tools -> TextAloud Options -> Article Options that automatically cleans up old articles in the archive. (Delete articles from archive older than xx days). We haven't had any problems reported in this area but I'll do some checking to see if I can find any problems.

Its very strange that both folders emptied simultaneously / around the same time ... I really can't explain it.

Do you happen to have any TextAloud log files (.dbg) files in your TA Data directory? In your data folder, locate the files TextAloudMP3.dbg, TextAloudMP31.dbg, TextAloudMP32.dbg and TextAloudMP33.dbg, attach them to an email, and send them to me at jim@nextup.com. If this is somehow a bug in TextAloud the log files may contain some clues.

If you happen to see the problem again please send these same files.

In the meantime, keep a backup of critical folders in the data directory (Archive, Articles, Dictionaries are probably the ones you want to backup). Or just backup the entire data directory. A backup tool like Crashplan (https://www.code42.com/crashplan/) is really good for something like this. For free, it will continuously backup any folders on your system to another folder/disk on your system, or to another computer on your network. There is also a subscription available for cloud backups. There are other tools out there as well.