Create and edit* documents or folders while offline, then connect to the Internet and try to synchronize the data.
Expected result
Everything to be synchronized.
Actual result
All folders and documents that I created offline immediately disappeared after synchronization (including existing documents that I put inside a newly created folder). Now whatever I create using the desktop app disappears and whatever I create in the web app works fine but doesnāt appear in the desktop app. Changes in existing documents are synchronized between both apps without any issues. Everything works fine in the web app.
Environment
Windows app. Not sure about the previous version since the main issue happened a few days ago, but itās still happening in version 1.0.14.
Additional information
* By ācreate and editā I mean I did pretty much everything you can do in Dynalist (created, renamed, edited, moved and deleted both documents and folders) before synchronizing.
This is what happens:
Iām behind a VPN + firewall, but the problem happens even when theyāre disabled.
Additional comments
I havenāt tried reinstalling the app because I hope there may be a backup hidden somewhere or at least some log to help find out whatās going on. I was lucky enough to lose only relatively unimportant documents, but one of them required some hard work and Iāll have to do it all over again
I hope this is simple to solve and no one else experiences it in the meantime! Thanks for your support
No worries! I just thought it would be important to address the issue before it affects other users. But since no one else has complained it must be something on my end. By the way, Iām now on 1.0.16, same problem (and it happens even when Iām online, as soon as it syncs)
I still havenāt reinstalled the app. Do you think thereās any way to recover what I lost? The items were previously saved online and I have their IDs in my browser history, but Iām guessing theyāre gone for goodā¦
If thereās anything I can do to help find out whatās happening (eg. by sending logs, debugging infoā¦), donāt hesitate to tell me!
If you have their IDs or document titles, we can recover it for you.
So when you checked the web version, they are gone from there as well? Also you said you have their IDs in your browser history, but didnāt you create them in the desktop app which didnāt get to sync to the web?
Sorry Iām a bit confused here, just want to get all the details right before proceeding.
Iāll use a few images to illustrate more or less what I did. I hope this is easy to understand.
Before the changes:
After the changes, before sync:
After sync:
Iāve just noticed another weird thing! I think the problem has something to do with the āroot folderāā¦ I have a few documents and one folder called āReferenceā at the root. If I create a new item anywhere (document or folder), the following happens:
Right after the item is created, I can open documents normally.
As soon as the appās status changes to āSavedā, I canāt open any document at the root anymore. If one of these documents was open, itās immediately closed (but not if the document is inside āReferenceā). I canāt open them anymore by clicking on them and they even disappear from the Ctrl+O list! However, I still can do anything normally in the folder āReferenceā (they also donāt disappear from the Ctrl+O list). If I close and reopen the app, I can open these documents again.
As soon as the status changes to āSyncedā, newly created items at the root disappear, as I said in the OP. However, items created in āReferenceā are successfully saved. More generally, anything I do in āReferenceā is successfully synchronized.
As I said before, edits in existing items are synced normally, even at the root.
I hope this isnāt too confusingā¦ I can record a video if you want.
By the way, just out of curiosity, are documents stored in plain text on the server?
As for the disappeared document, is it called āIMPORTANTā, or was that just an example? PM me the name if itās confidential, and weāll see what we can do. Retrieving the document is the most urgent, and we can discuss how to reproduce the issue and fix it later. You should know how to avoid it for now, given the rich information you have. So sorry about that!
To be honest, our current reality is making me more and more concerned about privacy, and even though it may not be necessary, itās always a relief to know that everything is encrypted. So itās basically curiosity =P
The more important document is called āDisciplinas cursĆ”veisā. I donāt remember what the other one was called, but it wasnāt very important anyway.
The weird thing is that the parent folder and the other document are there too, which means they were successfully sent to the server even though they disappeared for me. I wonder if all the other documents and folders I created while troubleshooting (with titles like āSomethingā and āffffā) were sent too
@Shida will reply this. I apologize in advance that there are technical details we shouldnāt really talk about in case someone with bad intentions reads it.
The reason why our data isnāt encrypted at rest is for two major reasons:
First, because of the way our infrastructure is right now, we do not get any additional security from encrypting the data compared to leaving it unencrypted at rest. It merely give us and our users a false sense of security in addition to requiring more work to be done to encrypt and decrypt the data coming in and going out.
We do our best to keep the servers secure using standard industry practices, but if all of our efforts still fail to prevent unauthorized data access, then itās almost certain that the malicious attacker can easily get access to our encryption key.
The second reason is more future-proofing. In the case we want to preform search operations on the server in the future, encryption will prevent us from being able to do so. Itās fairly common to leave out encryption for this reason, even for a large company like Slack: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808
So, should I uninstall the app to see if it works again or is it still useful to leave it as it is for debugging? (I donāt mind using just the web app and the Android app for now.)
You should be able to make it work by deleting everything under %appdata%/Dynalist/dynalist/data, no need to uninstall the app. Just quit app, delete the data files, and restart the app. It will re-pull everything from the server.
