HELP - 90% of Stuctured Keywords got deletet

[Juerg]

Hi Kirk,

Running on PM5.0 V. 15077 on a Win7 PC, about 90% of the keywords were deleted when I started PM today. Yesterday it was all fine. Nothing was done in the PM preferences or the keyword list between then ... attached a screen shot of the PM structured keyword dialog. As you can see, only the first two categories under "a" are still there ... everything else is gone :-(   

How can that happen?? 

Regards,
Juerg

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[Kirk Baker]

Juerg,

Running on PM5.0 V. 15077 on a Win7 PC, about 90% of the keywords were deleted when I started PM today. Yesterday it was all fine. Nothing was done in the PM preferences or the keyword list between then ... attached a screen shot of the PM structured keyword dialog. As you can see, only the first two categories under "a" are still there ... everything else is gone :-(   

How can that happen?

No idea.  You do have a backup of your preferences don't you?  Structured keywords database is a simple text file so it is easily backed up and restored.

-Kirk

[Juerg]

Hi Kirk,

Yes, I have one, but it's about 18 month old ...

But despite that fact: I still want to know how that can happen. The only program that accesses the structured keyword file is PM ... and as far as I know there is no way to delete multiple categories from within pm out of that file on purpose unless one opens that file manually in a text editor and deletes them. And that did not happen. It's also not that it got corrupted or something, PM just simply deleted everything below the 3rd category ...

And I don't want it to happen again

Juerg

[Hayo Baan]

Juerg,

I think it highly unlikely that PM actually deleted the keywords itself. What sounds more likely is that you got a data corruption on your drive. If you have not yet tried to edit the structured keywords in PM, try accessing the file itself in windows and see what it says.  Also run a disk checker program (eg. chkdsk) on your drive to see if it can find any problems.

All hardware fails eventually, once again showing the need for frequent and reliable backups.

Hope you can retrieve the keywords still!

[Kirk Baker]

Juerg,

But despite that fact: I still want to know how that can happen. The only program that accesses the structured keyword file is PM ... and as far as I know there is no way to delete multiple categories from within pm out of that file on purpose unless one opens that file manually in a text editor and deletes them. And that did not happen. It's also not that it got corrupted or something, PM just simply deleted everything below the 3rd category ...

And I don't want it to happen again

If it were a bug, I'd expect it to occur much more frequently.  Your report is the first one I have heard since Structured Keywords was implemented in version 4.5.

I'd suspect something symptomatic of a problem with your hardware.  Check your drives and your RAM.  And please start backing up your PM preferences folder in its entirety.

-Kirk