Urgent: Section gone?!

[Alex---1]

I was just moving a section putting it in order and Actinic just threw up a message saying 'bad file' and DELETED the entire section!

700+ products and hours went into creating that! Is there anyway to get it back?

Thanks for any help

EDIT: I have a backup with just that section but not other more recent ones? Is there a way to import various parts of a site snapshot?

[Fairyglass]

Hi Alex,
I'm sure someone with more knowledge will be along shortly, but if you have business plus (multisite) you could import your snapshot to a dummy site, then cut the section and paste into the live site. I've moved sections between sites before without any difficulty.

Another thought occurs- is the section definitely deleted, or could it have slipped into another section as a subsection? Try searching for an item only found in the missing section, if it's in the search then the section's still on the site somewhere.

Hope this helps- good luck!

[Alex---1]

Hi Alex,
I'm sure someone with more knowledge will be along shortly, but if you have business plus (multisite) you could import your snapshot to a dummy site, then cut the section and paste into the live site. I've moved sections between sites before without any difficulty.

Another thought occurs- is the section definitely deleted, or could it have slipped into another section as a subsection? Try searching for an item only found in the missing section, if it's in the search then the section's still on the site somewhere.

Hope this helps- good luck!

Hi,

Yep, Actinic deleted it (surprise surprise), I just tried previewing the site and it's minus 700 odd pages whilst checking it. I'm getting sick of this software now

I don't know what else to do other than start the section again tomorrow. Extremely annoyed at this.

[leehack]

If not moved into another section and 'paste' does not work, i think it's gone. A quickish way to confirm that is to upload the site and search for a products that was in one of those sections, you might find it moved into a different place by mistake. All i can suggest is that you backup every 50-100 products, doing 500 products with no backup is a little risky. It's a crap feeling when you lose them, I try and backup when the amount i have done would make me swear if i lost it.

[Alex---1]

If not moved into another section and 'paste' does not work, i think it's gone. A quickish way to confirm that is to upload the site and search for a products that was in one of those sections, you might find it moved into a different place by mistake. All i can suggest is that you backup every 50-100 products, doing 500 products with no backup is a little risky. It's a crap feeling when you lose them, I try and backup when the amount i have done would make me swear if i lost it.

I'm livid to say the least, starting again now from scratch. I think it's ridiculous that an £800 piece of software has such massive flaws such as this in it. It's appalling !

[Duncan Rounding]

You could have snapshot the bad site then reverted to your snapshot with just that section, then exported the catalog.

Now going back to your bad site snapshot export that catalog.

You now have all the data you need to recreate the catalog in excel and import it.

[Alex---1]

Actinic is having issues with importing my snapshots for some reason.

It's ok, I've accepted this stupid problem now and have started the section again - I shall be doing very regular backups this time!

Thanks for your assistance.

[nileshpa]

I share your pain, Alex.
It used to happen to me a lot before but now not as often. Root cause was memory and use to notice a little message 'out of memory' on some occasions. Up'ed the memory to 3GB as its running window XP.
Now, when moving sections around, I make sure nothing else is running, take frequent backups and only move a few sections at a time to minimise any loss. Its stupid but thats the way it is. The sound advice as suggested by both, Lee & Duncan, is what has got me out of these kind of mess many times.

On a side side note, I really think Actinic should have some sort of resilience built-in to prevent loss of data. For goodness sake, its a database at the backend.

Nilesh