Dear Thortspace … I opened my Thortspace App today, and all my spheres have disappeared !
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I have been looking for a program like Thortspace all my life and since discovering it, have been pouring data into the program for the past week to organize my life. However, I opened the program today to find everything I had worked on missing, though still logged in, though it appears as if it was newly installed somehow, as all the features I unlocked have re-locked. There is nothing in the archive, all my info is gone, I had not yet created a cloud subscription but was meaning to, but was not under the impression it all would disappear if I didn’t. I’m using Android.
Could a faulty sim card prompt a ‘reset’ of the program? At one point I dropped the device, and had a “Sim Card Missing” error, which I resolved. All my data on other Apps, was fine after this, but not Thortspace. Also possibly relevant, might another device (iPad) with the same login cause problems? I had assumed it might link with my phone and the data on it of I registered the same account until I realized the subscription was needed, and wasn’t clear on what would occur if I had work on both devices before making a subscription, so i held off on doing so. They both seemed to work fine in tandem until today. Might it be hiding in some folder in my phone perhaps?
Please let me know if there is any way to retrieve all my work, I do hope to invest in and make use of this great program, but unexplained data loss is impossible to cope with. Please advise.
Dear Thortspace User,
I am distraught to hear that you have lost data.
There is certainly no obligation to subscribe to the paid service in order to avoid losing data.
Perhaps we need to change our approach, but as things stand the Thortspace system is supposed to work as follows:
The two accounts (on your Android phone and your iPad) are the same account if you logged in with the same email, but under the terms of “Free” account, spheres do not sync between devices or get backed up to Google’s cloud unless they are made Public (they just stay — as long as nothing goes wrong — in a local folder on each device and that’s the only place they are stored — completely separate from each other)
Thortspace lets you keep your data locally on your devices and computers (you don’t even have to log in to do this)
Or if you create a Free account and make your spheres Public (so they become visible on web here: https://thort.space) they will then sync between all your devices and computers that are logged in to the same account, and they will also backup to Google’s cloud service.
Or you can buy a subscription, in which case the spheres will sync between devices and backup to Google’s cloud even without being made Public.
(You can still make them Public if you want to.)
Please could you say:
(1) Did you at any time uninstall and reinstall the App on either the Android phone or the iPad ? (This can have the consequence of deleting the local data folder on that device.)
(2) Roughly how many spheres did you make on each of the Android phone and on the iPad ?
(3) Did you make any of your spheres “Public” on either of these devices ?
(4) Did you at any time get a message when you started the App saying that a sphere you were previously viewing could not be opened ?
(5) Have the spheres disappeared from both the Android phone and the iPad or just one of these ?
User responds:
I had figured that having multiple devices not yet linked wouldn’t create a problem, and that once I’d gotten a subscription one device syncing would merge with data from the other rather than overwrite. So that’s encouraging, if I understand correctly.
I haven’t been able to find the file folder, wondering if I would find it if I connected to my computer and explored it that way, curious to know if you know the default file path to the local containing folder on an Android?
I had reservations about the ‘Public’ option given my data is my personal life-planning info ,and my personal music research, and also was not in any kind of finalized state. Wasn’t sure if this meant that anyone could access the data, or it was just ‘more online’. I assumed it was a way to provide users with a peek into what others do with the program — but is it appropriate for unfinished or more personal types of info? Assuming not, I’d intended to go the subscription route, though I have not yet. Figured it might be best to try to retrieve this data before subscribing, as it adds another layer I know nothing about.
To answer your questions:
(1) I did not reinstall. However upon opening when I noticed the data was missing, the home menu returned to only the think and do modes, without the unlocked features.
(2) I’d made at least 8 empty spheres I’d meant to populate on the Android, and about 4 spheres on the iPad. On both devices I had enabled and made use of embedded spheres and also linked spheres. I’m wondering if this has something to do with it. I noticed that embedding separate spheres (yet unfilled) and long-pressing thorts to navigate to the embedded ones sometimes made the links between those embedded disappear (this happened on the iPad) and sometimes, they would reappear, with no clear reason.
Id taken the ‘copying the parent sphere’ approach at some point as well, and on the Android I embedded all other spheres (still empty and unlinked) which were the various categories I meant to sort the thorts/groups that I had entered into and organized on the copy of the parent sphere, which was my ‘unstructured’ to-do list which I meant to sort into the embedded spheres. I was wondering if embedding the wrong way would create an issue with parent/child relationships or if the program could handle sphere in a globally non-hierarchical way (i.e. X has Y imbedded, Y has X embedded), if this makes sense?
Both had many groups and close to 100 thorts each, if this is relevant.
(3) I did not make anything public.
(4) I did not get the ‘could not be opened’ message
(5) spheres had disappeared only from the Android
Dear Thortspace User,
Sorry to be asking stupid questions, but are you absolutely sure that:
(1) you are “still logged in” on the Android device?
… ie. on the home screen it shows the email of your account at the top ?
If you are definitely still logged in on the Android device,
please could you try logging out and then logging in again?
(Use the “My Account” button to do this.)
The reason being that when you say: “However upon opening when I noticed the data was missing, the home menu returned to only the think and do modes, without the unlocked features.”
our techy guru tells me:
“That doesn’t happen without a logout or a wipe of local data.
In either of those two cases you wouldn’t still be logged in;
I think there’s a possible way it could happen if you deleted some but not all of the local data and it still had credentials but nothing else, but that’s not a usual way to end up.”
Again, sorry to be asking stupid questions, but:
(2) When you say that all your spheres have disappeared, where are you looking for them? Are you looking on the “Search” tab (left side) under “My Spheres”?
More generally:
Clearly what happened in your case is not acceptable.
However at the moment I’m not clear how it happened or what to do about it.
At the moment I think all we have in respect of what could have caused this are guesses, and none of the guesses seem especially likely.
If you did the ‘clear data’ option from the Android apps menu that would also wipe spheres, as would a factory reset. From the sound of it you might have been logged back out, it does sound like a pretty well reset app.
But none that seems to apply in your case.
In answer to your question about the local data path, you won’t be able to find the folder by hand because it’s in private app data rather than in the shared-and-visible-to-all-apps storage that Android lets you copy files to and from.
You can’t manually get at spheres on Android or iOS.
On Windows desktop computers the file path for local sphere data is:
C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\Gooisoft\Thortspace
This and a lot of other “info for techies” is all in this article:
https://medium.com/thortspace/thortspace-info-for-techies-c486478f5629
User Responds
I completely understand, it’s important to rule out the obvious as well. I can only imagine the variables you have to take into account.
I am indeed still logged in and had not logged out since first registering the account on the device.
I logged out and in again, to no avail.
Your colleague’s point makes sense, but the only significant thing I remember happening between using it last with data intact and finding it had disappeared was dropping my phone (hence the question about my sim card). But again I’m not sure why only this data might be missing, while my other data is ok, unless spheres are somehow stored on the sim and got wiped when the fall caused it to give the “simcard missing” error. Honestly, new to the program and finding my way around, I still hadn’t found a way to get rid of accidentally created spheres except archiving, so it was all the more surprising to find it all had disappeared.
Ive looked in the search tab, spheres and thorts, and in the archive. Nothing there.
Unlikely as it may be, what I’ve described is the case to my best recollection. I did not manually wipe the data. The only things I might suspect are related to having dropped my device or, perhaps something to do with convoluted linking or two-way embedding of empty spheres, since I’d first created the containers which were embedded on a sphere where I’d been organizing data to later sort into the appropriate embedded spheres.
I feel unsettled at the thought that my file may be there but inaccessible in my Android, and am wondering if Id have luck requesting access from the company somehow or otherwise find a way in, though am unsure if this is something you can speak to. But thanks for info on the location of the file.
I accept that my data may not come back. I see your dedication, and a program in active development which allows me the dimensions to represent my mental map in ways I’ve always dreamed about. I’m excited and in support of the program and while I agree, I don’t want to think it might happen again, as a lifelong list maker/ mind-mapper/diagrammer, I’ve always known I’d find a program like this, and have big hopes for what it might help me do. If there are more avenues to explore to retrieve my data, I’m happy to explore. The tech article is illuminating, but not leading me to my solution here. In any case I truly do appreciate your attention on this.
Conclusion
Subsequent to the above email exchange the implementation team discussed at length what happened in this case, and what could be done to improve the user-experience of Free user accounts that lose local data.
In the light of what happened in this case, the implementation team at Thortspace have resolved to implement the following changes in the medium term:
Users who log in to the Thortspace App on Free accounts will have their Private spheres backed up to the cloud (just like their Public spheres already are) together with a DeviceID. This will enable private spheres owned by Free account users to be recovered and restored to the original device in the event of local data being lost by either a defective device or other rare event.
Please note
(1) What happened in this case happened to local data on an Android device that had experienced a “Sim card missing” error. Although it is not clear how this could have reset the local data in the Thortspace App, users should not need to worry that the above case is anything except very very rare.
(2) If you are using Public spheres as a Free user, or Private spheres and you are a subscriber, then all your spheres are backed up onto Google’s cloud, and so even if you do have a hardware fault or other rare event on a device, it would ordinarily be possible to recover your spheres from Google’s cloud. What happened in the case we first of all a very rare event, and second of all, it happened to locally stored data which had never been backed up to Google’s cloud, and so couldn’t be recovered in this way.
(3) In general we don’t have any code in the app that does a wipe of the local cache. For example, even if you log out, the cache for that user doesn’t get deleted — the program just directs you to a default cache.
The only way to delete the local cache that we know of is to do one of these things:
- Uninstall and reinstall the App
- Go into the App Settings in the Android Settings system, and clear the App’s data
- Do a system reset on the Android device.
But we know that the user here didn’t do any of those things, because if they had, they would have also been left logged out of their account, which evidently they weren’t. So as yet it remains a mystery how the local data was lost.
