Ubuntu
tomboy package

Tomboy lost notes (Data loss) on crash.

Bug #1068783 reported by Jeff Lane 
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
tomboy (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I had a kernel crash today (I'm running a test kernel for the kernel team to sort out some issues I noticed that are not related to this bug).

I had tomboy running as I use Tomboy daily for keeping notes on my work for the day. I had three notes open.

1: yesterday's work log
2: today's work log
3: notes from a meeting I had earlier this week.

the only one of those notes that were NEW was today's work log.

The kernel crashed, forcing me to power cycle the machine to reboot. After booting to a more stable kernel, I re-opened Tomboy and discovered that my three notes were completely gone. Missing as though they had never existed. There's no hint of them at all in .local/share/tomboy

because of this, I lost all my notes from my meeting, meaning lost work and lost time. They have also apparently disappeared from U1. It seems as though tomboy synchronized and deleted the server side copies as well. I do not delete notes myself. I have status notes going back to 2010 when I first started using tomboy.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: tomboy 1.10.1-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 3.3.0-030300rc4-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu14
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 19 14:10:18 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Alpha amd64 (20120307)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: tomboy
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

Revision history for this message
Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Aaron D Borden (adborden) wrote :

Thanks for reporting. Do the notes exist in the backup directory? Usually: $HOME/.local/share/tomboy/Backup/

This issue sounds similar to the ext4 issue[1] but that usually truncates the notes, the files should still exist after the power cycle. This has been plaguing tomboy for a while now. Any help is appreciated.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653445

Revision history for this message
Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote :

No... the notes are completely gone. It happened again today, as a matter of fact. I had one note open for today's work log, and one opened with notes from a meeting I had this morning.

System crashed, when I rebooted and opened Tomboy up again, BOTH notes are gone. I looked in .local/share/tomboy and they simply are not there, nor are they in the backup directory.

I must now look for a replacement for a tool I've used for over two years now. :( I can not use a tool that causes data loss like this. I've completely lost my to-do list from two meetings which is worse than losing my daily log, which I'll need for a status meeting tomorrow. :(

Revision history for this message
Jeff Lane  (bladernr) wrote :

OK, with some pointers, it does look like it's related to that bug. I finally some found notes that coincide with the crashes which have been truncated to 0 bytes:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 bladernr bladernr 0 Oct 19 13:26 571943ec-c757-4921-b308-860aa3e516c9.note
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bladernr bladernr 0 Oct 19 13:26 668cdaf2-c086-4f04-b18d-4fb8d09dca3f.note
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bladernr bladernr 0 Oct 22 14:26 b67e4067-5d0d-43a8-9f22-f31e24499c0f.note
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bladernr bladernr 0 Oct 22 14:26 ba7ddba5-c94b-4b22-89d3-336e325cc054.note

And they do not have corresponding copies in Backup.

Revision history for this message
Anders Murphy (kneb2) wrote :

Sounds related to this, and it's really annoying that it hasn't been fixed yet:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomboy/+bug/580333?comments=all

I mean it's been happening since 2010

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in tomboy (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
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