TOPIC: iPhone Sync deletes all Collected Thoughts on iPho

Not sure if anyone has come across this before. I have been using Thinking Rock on a Windows 7 64bit Laptop with your iPhone app running on my old 3G iPhone with latest OS4. Because of the usual awful battery life of the iPhone I have WiFi turned off most of the time. I have discovered to my cost that if you forget to turn WiFi on on your iPhone before initiating a sync in Thinking Rock basically the first thing the iPhone app appears to do is delete all local data prior to attempting a sync. So after a restless night where I entered some 20 thoughts during the night I lost the lot because the sync deleted the local data before realising it could not get a connection. I then turned on wifi but by that time it was too late all the data had gone. Just the last sync data on my PC came back.

It would be really nice to get a fix for this. The idea of a trusted system is that you can put stuff into it and then find it again, I have read David Allen's book. So at present I cannot trust the thinking rock iPhone app to look after my thoughts. Is there any chance it can check if WiFi is enabled and issue a warning if not?

Other than that I love Thinking Rock and would also love to be able to do cloud syncing like I used to with Omni-Focus when I had a MacBook.

All the best


Alan M

We will have a look and try to reproduce it.

Hi Alan,

Very sorry to hear about your loss of data...naturally this is something we'd be very keen to get to the bottom of.

So far I've been unable to reproduce the behaviour you describe.

The sync process consists of 5 steps.
1. create a data connection between the desktop and iphone
2. iphone uploads thoughts and ticked off actions to the desktop
3. iphone deletes its local database
4. iphone downloads new actions/topics/contexts etc from the desktop
5. connection is closed.

I could see things going wrong if the desktop app was to crash between steps 3 or 4, but failing to enable the wifi should prevent even step 1 from happening.

If possible can you let me know the version of the sync module you are using, as well as the version of the deskop and iphone app.

Has it happened again at all? Can you try to reproduce the problem if you have tiime?
Thanks
S8.

We've had a second report on this behaviour that suggests that the app is crashing partway through.

Alan can you confirm that the app crashes (i.e. the phone drops back to the home screen)?

The app does not always crash back to the home screen, it will loose data anyway. But I can confirm that I have had my iPhone do this, yes it has crashed back to the home screen during a sync.

Here are my steps to reproduce the loss of all entered thoughts and indeed all data. Please note that the desktop application is not required at all to reproduce this problem.

1). Run Thinking Rock app on the iPhone.
2). Enter a thought. (I just typed 'Test1' into the Description field, did not bother with a topic)
3). Exit the Thinking Rock iPhone application.
4). Go to iPhone General settings and turn off your WiFi connection.
5). Run Thinking Rock app on the iPhone.
6). Check that the thought is still there.
7). Select 'Sync'
8). On the Syncronisation page tap the 'Sync Data' button.
9.) The sync gets stuck as it never receives an answer.
10. Exit the Thinking Rock iPhone app.
11). Re-Run Thinking Rock app on the iPhone.
12). Select 'Thoughts'
13). Note All thoughts and all data have been wiped.

I can do this every time, basically it will also occur if your WiFi connection is interrupted during a sync operation which I have also had when my iPhone dropped the WiFi once and I had not noticed when I started the sync.

Alan M

Another thought,

Although I am not a programmer by profession it seems to me that it is the act of exiting the Thinking Rock iPhone app during a sync that results in the local database being wiped.

The first time this happened to me was when I had realised I had not turned WiFi on on my iPhone before I started the Sync. My natural reaction to this was to exit the iPhone app using the home button, turn WiFi on and then return to the Thinking Rock app to start the sync again. However when I retuned to the TR app all data had gone, everything not just my recent thoughts. I had the TR app crash to the home screen about 30 minutes ago during a sync and again all data was gone. So it appears to be that any attempt to exit the app whether by design, using the home button, or by a crash while a sync is trying to run will result in the loss of all data. Basically if the TR app cannot get a connection to the external database over WiFi for what ever reason it just sits there, saying it is syncing. It never times out and offers a way out of sync mode. So you only option is to hit the home button and that deletes the local database.

Anyhow, hopefully this can be resolved.

Alan M