Lost tasks and tags after activating sync over icloud

HackGeschnetzeltes

I added a bunch of tags and tasks on my iphone.

Then I activated synching over icloud on my ipad.

Then when I synched manually on ipad and iphone, all the tasks and tags I was working on today were synchronized, but all the other tasks and tags were lost.

Can I recover them in any way? A lot of work for planning of my tasks would otherwise be lost.

Best, Roman

timo

Sounds like you were working on both devices simultaneously before waiting for a sync to occur. There app tries to handle conflicts like these as good as it can, but it doesn't always lead to the same result as the user expects. You created different tags and tasks on both iPad and iPhone before connecting to the sync. Now which database state is considered to be the "correct" one?
You can't recover from this unless you are importing from the daily backups on the Cloud. But as you are used iCloud, you cannot access these files (compared to all the other sync options).

HackGeschnetzeltes

Dear timo,

Thank you for the response!

did not create any tags or tasks on the ipad, the app there was empty.
All the data was on the iphone.
However, I did switch on the sync on the ipad first, and then on the iphone, which must have then caused the overwrite with the empty data. However, it seems to me to be a very easy issue to check and prevent, e.g. by raising a warning “you have db conflict, do you want to continue?”, or even “which db do you want to keep - ours or theirs?”.

HackGeschnetzeltes

I believe the behavior I encountered is not something a reasonable user would expect from the app, and that it should be fixed.

timo

I totally agree that this should not happen. WorkingHours has some mechanisms that should catch certain cases and also display alerts for the user to decide, but it might not have worked in this situation. I will try to reproduce this and see if there's something I can do to prevent it from happening.
Sorry for the problems

timo

I was able to reproduce this and WorkingHours also detected that a merge should happen, however the problem in this case was that the tags and tasks you created were not used by and work units. If they had been used by work units (on the iPhone) then the tasks and tags would have been merged to the database.

HackGeschnetzeltes

This is exactly what happened: the tasks I started working on and their tags were kept, and the tasks and tags I planned for the week but haven’t started yet got lost.

HackGeschnetzeltes

So I think the tasks and tags should be kept in the database even if they are not used by work units

Saidi

I just experienced a similar thing. I lost all tags that I had put for my tasks for the past two months! For context, I have one task called "Work", and rely on the tags to categorize what I am working on. This way, I can see what work I have been doing. A tag is usually a project and a type of task. Over time, this has helped me see where I put my time. But now, Timo, I have lost this wealth of data out of nowhere.

Let me also add that I just upgraded my Mac OS from 15.2.xxx to 15.4. That's when I noticed this. But I have tags on my tasks from 3 months back and beyond. Only these past two months have completely disappeared.

Thank you!

OS Version: Mac OS X 15.4
App Version: 2.11.28

timo

Can you explain the problem in more detail?

This issue is about the Cloud Sync. You didn't mention if you also use the Cloud Sync or if you lost the data after enabling the Cloud Sync
When you say "I had put tags for my tasks", do you really refer to "tasks" as the WorkingHours app or do you actually mean "work units". Terminology matters here, to avoid confusion
Did the tags disappear completely, or are they just no longer connected to your tasks or work units?
When exactly did the tags disappear? Please describe it as precisely as possible. Did you use the Cloud Sync before or did you use it for the first time today? On what devices are or were you using the app and/or the Cloud Sync?
When you say "the past two months have completely disappeared", do you mean all data from the last two months have disappeared or "only" the tags or only the tag-relations?

Saidi Let me also add that I just upgraded my Mac OS from 15.2.xxx to 15.4

Is there a slim possibility that - for whatever reason - your macOS has TimeMachine enabled and the system restored an outdated version of the database after the update?