Anytype has been my primary PKM, task manager, and research repository for about 1.5 years. I use it every single day and I have thousands of objects. Up until now, all the challenges I’ve faced have had to do with missing features (like this), but overall, Anytype is in beta, the team is incredible, and it’s a great project. And more importantly, even though there is room for improvement, it works and I can do my work effectively and keep my data safe.
In the past few days though, I’ve been freaking out: I’ve been looking for an object that has simply disappeared from my space. It is very frustrating to have lost this particular object because it was notes from a course I took. While I know there is a possibility that I deleted it by mistake, this is very unlikely given how important it was… The object was also created after Anytype moved to open beta, so the app was already stable.
The bookmarks that were in the canvas of that object (links to YouTube videos) are still in my space, but there is simply no trace of the object itself. I looked at my oldest backup, just two months after the object was created (August 2023), and it wasn’t there either.
Losing this object is frustrating, but it’s also worrying because if this object disappeared, how can I know others haven’t also disappeared, or will not disappear in the future? Given how many objects I have, I would likely notice years after it is gone. Now that my life is almost entirely stored in Anytype, losing objects, even if it happens infrequently, losing objects like that would be disastrous.
Have others experienced something like this? Anyone worried about lost objects? Or suggestions on where to look or how to recover?
I’ll add one more thing: to me, it’s not as bad if I deleted the object by mistake, but its still very bad. I’m a tech savvy person and I’m very careful about safeguarding my data. If I mistakenly delete an important object, then there is a major UX problem and it is just as worrying as if it was a bug, because it may happen again…
It happened to me once, but not with an object. Instead, it involved four blocks of paragraphs and images that suddenly disappeared from one of the objects I had. I didn’t think much of it and assumed I had deleted them by mistake. However, after digging through some old backups I had, I was surprised to find that it was even deleted in my old backup, which is weird. the only way I recover the 2 images and 2 block of paragraph from old notion documents I had.
Our technology is built in a way that ensures nothing can be lost, as every change is cryptographicly signed and saved. We always can travel via the history of changes. Bugs can happen, and we’d be happy to investigate what occurred, why you can’t see your object anymore.I’ll move this into the bug section. Please describe the issue as a bug, and we’ll find a solution.
@raph Please add your tech info, and describe the issue if you would like us to continue investigating the issue (ideally, you would just create a new bug report).
Holy shit, I started drafting a separate, detailed bug report and as I did more research, I found the lost object!
It was in an October 2023 backup (the object was created in August 2023 and updated through September 2023), but not in the following backups (starting in February 2024). I’m still unclear about what happened and why it was deleted. As I mentioned before, I wouldn’t have deleted it willingly.
Is there additional information I can add to help understand what happened?
