Question

I have a problem with losing prior revisions, including the original save. I pasted in TWiki text to a wrong page and lost the entire topic, even the revisions. They were instead mostly the material that I pasted in by accident. This meant that I could not go back.

The original text is just totally gone. We even looked at the topic.txt,v file. It contains the changes but not the entire text of the original page in any way.

The pasted in material contained a form (based on the one in twiki.org for IndigoPerlCookbook) and a small Javascript that wrote to the TWIKIPrefs cookie using setPref(). Yes, I know that this is evil....

No changes were being made concurrently on this topic. The topic was last edited two weeks previously. Topic edit history (who and when) was retained for the revisions.

Page is public so feel free to poke around if it would help. But it may be restored by the time you get to it.

*UPDATE*: We've restored our page. However, a copy of the problem page is still up. See the history for a sample of what happened.

No errors in apache log.

We are on the following:

• TWiki-4.0.4-4, Wed, 14 Jul 2006, build 11482
• gentoo
• dual 3.2GHz Xeons, 8GB ram 5 73GB HD's in a RAI

It's an underfunded group so moving to the new version has stalled, although they apply the hotfixes. Is this a problem that has been seen by anyone else?

Added note: The other troubling thing is that my mis-post is labeled as being done by another person, so this is screwing with the paper trail. The save I did is not on the list, which would make sense since I immediately posted the "page down" and didn't think to force a new revision. Still, odd that it puts it as being done by her.

Environment

-- ForrestChristian - 24 May 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

If you create a topic, and then create a new revision of that topic within the threshold for replacement (rather than a new version) then you will see only the revised text; the original will indeed be lost. This is probably what you did, though it's hard to tell; there are a lot of revs on that topic. When did this problem occur? On rev 1?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 26 May 2007

This started on the last revision but one. I put in text that shouldn't have been there and saved it. Then I said oops and tried to go back but the original materials were gone. These two revisions should be the same, since the second is simply the restored backup of the first:

• One I overwrote
• Restored from backup

I know about the revision timeouts: what I am saying is that I saved a single revision, which somehow overwrote the prior revisions with that materials. The material that I saved originally would have been overwritten by the "Page is down" that I then did. It's the fact that all of the previous revisions were suddenly gone, replaced with the mateirals that I had originally, mistakenly pasted in.

-- ForrestChristian - 29 May 2007

Extraordinary. My best guess would be that there is something wrong with your RCS. I can't imagine how that would happen otherwise. Are you using RcsLite? I fixed a doozy of a problem in RcsLite, I think in 4.0.5; but it shouldn't have had the effect you describe.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 May 2007

Yeah, it's a neat problem which is why I posted it. I'm wondering if it is my ill-advised use of Javascript embedded into the topic content. We are using RcsLite.

Should we consider implementing Subversion instead?

-- ForrestChristian - 29 May 2007

Try to use RcsWrap instead of RcsLite. In configure, look for {StoreImpl}. This assumes rcs is installed on your system.

-- PeterThoeny - 29 May 2007

Unlikely to be your use of Javascript. It's more likely you tripped over the problem I fixed. You can repair broken topics manually, though it's quite tricky and only to be done if you are really desperate....

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 May 2007

I'm going to close this -- we still haven't been able to see what it was but right now I'm blaming RCSLite and a wretched implementation. Solution: create a real installation from scratch and port all our data and pub stuff over to it.

-- ForrestChristian - 11 Jun 2007