When Will I Learn?
March 5, 2022•382 words
I lost some information in a program called Infobase. When you stop laughing, I'll tell you how I got it back.
Are you done?
Okay, so, I've been testing Infobase since late January, 2022. It's clunky and weird, but I liked having my notes in a single window for reasons. Whenever I'm doing research, I open a plain text editor to paste links and jot notes. I will save the text file until I have time to clean it up and store it in Infobase. After I move text file contents, I often keep the file as a reminder. I may type something in the file or simply rename the file to Such and Such Moved to Infobase.txt.
Shortly after I had transferred the cleaned up research to Infobase, I managed to delete it. I also managed to be unaware that I had done so! Yesterday, when I searched for the information and couldn't find it, I sort of panicked. The information wan't vital (I use Standard Notes and RoboForm for important stuff.)
Today, I did a little hunting around through the Infobase backups, but couldn't find the information. Thankfully, I remembered that I had a file named Such and Such Moved to Infobase.txt I fired up Macrium Reflect, a nice disk backup application. It has a feature where I can "mount" a backup image as a drive. That, in turn, allows me to browse the backups on that image, just like I would browse the C:\ drive.
I selected the backup image from the date that I had created Such and Such Moved to Infobase.txt, knowing that the information would not have been moved that quickly. Sure enough, the information, all messy and raw, was there.
Whew!
So, what did I learn from this? Maybe I should use Standard Notes more and stop hunting for sticky note replacement software. On a deeper level, I realized that Infobase saves each category of notes in a separate file. So there is no benefit to using it over saving data in simple text files. (Infobase stores everything in text files, unlike some apps, which use sqlite3 databases.)