Bare with me here, I am still trying to piece together what happened.
We have a form that is used to record information that is collected over several days and theoretically recorders are saving, marking the form incomplete, at the end of each day.
One of my coworkers reports that one of these incomplete forms is gone. Since he was out of town he was forced to open and a new form and continue with his work.
Today his tablet came back and I can see that ODK has three saved instances for this type of form. The directory for the newest instance, which according to the XML data was started the day the original form disappeared, contains several photos which are obviously related to the original, erased form. In fact, according to the photo metadata these photos were taken before this newest instance was created. The other two instances are from earlier months and definitely not related to this situation.
The plot thickens....
We have an app that backs up the ODK instances directory every 5 minutes to an SD card - the thinking is that in the event that a tablet is damaged we can at least pop out the card and recover our data. If we go to the back up and look at the instance directory that has the same file name as its counterpart on the tablet, the XML is clearly for the original, now erased form. (Unfortunately the person who set up the back neglected to set it to overwrite previous versions, so we only have the initial save, not the complete form.)
I presume that the original form is lost. I'm curious as to what likely happened here? I see that ODK collect was updated recently and there is an issue with that forcing ODK to close forms. Did that erase the original form? If so, why was a new form created in an instance directory that contained the photos/retained the name of the original form?
Sorry to hear about your data loss. Collect has been used in the field
for millions of forms and this is the first time I've heard of
something like this.
Unless a user initiates a delete (either manually or delete after
send). Collect never deletes instances. It's improbable that an
upgrade removed that instance. It's more likely something external
removed it.
And until we can see the existing folder structure, the existing
backup structure, and the form database, it's going to be impossible
to help you understand what happened.
Yaw
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Bare with me here, I am still trying to piece together what happened.
We have a form that is used to record information that is collected over several days and theoretically recorders are saving, marking the form incomplete, at the end of each day.
One of my coworkers reports that one of these incomplete forms is gone. Since he was out of town he was forced to open and a new form and continue with his work.
Today his tablet came back and I can see that ODK has three saved instances for this type of form. The directory for the newest instance, which according to the XML data was started the day the original form disappeared, contains several photos which are obviously related to the original, erased form. In fact, according to the photo metadata these photos were taken before this newest instance was created. The other two instances are from earlier months and definitely not related to this situation.
The plot thickens....
We have an app that backs up the ODK instances directory every 5 minutes to an SD card - the thinking is that in the event that a tablet is damaged we can at least pop out the card and recover our data. If we go to the back up and look at the instance directory that has the same file name as its counterpart on the tablet, the XML is clearly for the original, now erased form. (Unfortunately the person who set up the back neglected to set it to overwrite previous versions, so we only have the initial save, not the complete form.)
I presume that the original form is lost. I'm curious as to what likely happened here? I see that ODK collect was updated recently and there is an issue with that forcing ODK to close forms. Did that erase the original form? If so, why was a new form created in an instance directory that contained the photos/retained the name of the original form?