Can I restore a backup of Logos? I deleted a lot of work accidentally.

I had a lot of entries in my Logos5 Favorites that I accidentally deleted and Logos says they are lost for good. That's pretty harsh.

I had set of folders in Favorites: Biblical Studies - Books -> N.T. -> followed by a folder for each NT book with links to books in my library under each one. I inadvertently deleted the N.T. folder and found there is no undelete.

I'm on a Windows7 system so I tried restoring the two files in Users\Jim\Appdata\Local\Logos5\Documents\Favorites\ from a day old system backup, but that didn't work. Is that because Logos synchronization over-wrote the backup files when I started the program?

Does anyone know a way I can use my daily system backups to recover from this?

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Dave Hooton

Does anyone know a way I can use my daily system backups to recover from this?

Go offline (e.g. switch off your Internet connection), restore your backup. Rename the N.T. folder. Go online and let it sync. Then rename it again!

Any entries added after your backup should be sync'd as well.

Jim

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/680186#Comment_680186

Go offline (e.g. switch off your Internet connection), restore your backup. Rename the N.T. folder. Go online and let it sync. Then rename it again!

Any entries added after your backup should be sync'd as well.

So far no joy. Going off line and restoring the backup does allow me to see my Favorites the way I had them. However renaming the deleted NT folder then going online and letting it sync resulted in the renamed folder being completely empty. I did it over, but moved the renamed NT folder somewhere else - it still came up empty. Since the NT folder had several levels of folders nested underneath, I did the whole thing over again and also renamed each nested folder. The result was that the renamed NT folder contained all the renamed folders, but they were all empty!

Jim

Thanks to Dave's suggestion I've been able to get some restoration. Here's what I had to do:

Disable internet access to the computer.
Restore the contents of the C:\Users\Jim\AppData\Local\Logos5\Documents\...\FavoritesManager folder from my own daily backup of my computer so I would be able to see the Favorite folders and links I had deleted.
Open Logos
Create a new folder in Favorites and new subfolder structure mimicking the ones that I had deleted but with new names like Corinthians-1 instead of Corinthians
Then manually move all the links from the old folders to the new ones
Close Logos, enable internet access, open Logos.
Fix all the new folder names

This has taken several hours and I've still lost some of the organization I had labored to create in the first place because I just didn't want to put in the extra time to create as many subfolders as I originally had.

The fact that Logos did not provide either a undo or a capability to backup user data in this instance is quite unforgivable in this modern computer age. I use many other computer programs and nothing else is this harsh on the user.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/680258#Comment_680258

If the data had synced to the Logos cloud, often Tech Support is able to restore it for you from a backup of their servers. Sorry you already spent several hours trying to restore it. But you might try calling Faithlife Tech Support in the morning and seeing if they can help you.

I totally agree that this is another area of the program needing undo support!

Jim

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/680260#Comment_680260

you might try calling Faithlife Tech Support in the morning and seeing if they can help you.

I did that immediately after I accidentally deleted the Favorites folder. I was directed to a web site that was supposed to contain deleted information and asked to see if anything looked like the data I lost but I didn't see anything familiar. Then, after the person I spoke to talked to a "level 2" technician I was told there was no hope. I asked where the favorites data was stored and was clearly told that it wasn't stored on my hard drive only "in the program" which I did not accept. I found the Favorites data base folder while the technician again consulted a "level 2 tech" but they simply repeated that there was no way to restore the lost data. When I asked how I might go about restoring the favorites database files from my own backups I was again told that the data wasn't stored there but if I wanted to try, I was on my own.

Dustin Masters (Work)

Sorry for the trouble, Jim.

I'm one of the engineers who works on our cloud sync platform. I should be able to restore your deleted favorites for you. Was it just the "N.T." folder you need recovered?

If you would prefer to email me directly, my email address is dustin.masters@faithlife.com.

Jim

Despite Dave's suggestion and Dustin's help, it remains true that it is EXTREMELY difficult to backup the Favorites data. I keep local backups and could restore the appropriate file(s) but Logos quickly over-wrote them with its latest copy. The suggestion of renaming a folder in the backup then letting Logos sync doesn't fully work. I renamed the top level folder, but it had nested folders underneath and Logos erased all the links in those folders. If this involved only a few links and folder it might be recoverable, but I had years worth of accumulated folders and links.

So far I'd say that Logos has made a big mistake in the way this user data is managed. Any user data should be recoverable from backups.