iCloud Sync Deleted Everything...Please Help!

profcyclist

I have iCloud sync on and it has been working fine across my devices. I connected my MacBook today and it wasn't setup for iCloud. I removed the old original files with PDFs and deleted them. So I had a clean local version. I think shut down ST3, started again, and enabled iCloud, which are same steps I did on other computers. However, when I enable iCloud and it had me restart ST3, everything is now gone on all devices!

I have a show this Saturday and have over 100 songs with lyrics, timings, and MIDI programming all in them. Hundreds of hours of work. I haven't forced a backup in at least a month. Please tell me there is a way to recover.

I can't underscore my level of desperation for this. Hundreds of hours of programming all these. I'm sick to my stomach...

EDIT: I don't need the audio files, just the lyrics I manually programming along with MIDI changes.

peter

I hope you have made a backup. Either in the App or with Timemachine on your Mac. You will have to restore the backup to get your songs back.

From what you wrote it seems that the Mac had Cloud Sync enabled at one point. So when you deleted everything on the Mac and then enabled Cloud Sync, this deletes got pushed to the Cloud.

profcyclist

peter Thank you. Where can I look on Timemachine to find it? I have all the local stuff backing up as far as I know.

peter

You need to restore this folder: ~/Library/Containers/Stage Traxx 3

After that, fire up ST3 and create a full backup first thing. Then try to enable Cloud Sync. It might delete your songs again but if that happens restore the full backup you just created and that will be synced to all your devices.

profcyclist

peter Wanted to let you know I had a TimeMachine back that was only a couple days old, so I was able to restore it and only lost a couple hours of work. Whew! I appreciate you help on this. I'm nervous to open any new iCloud connections. I suppose a failsafe is to disconnect the device from the Internet first and then delete any files in that one directory, then open and enable? I worry the baseline "blank" database that has to exist when it open will get overwritten, but I'll obviously be more vigilant with manual backups as well as adding this to my other Carbonite backup solution.

SansMuso

Hi Peter, I recently had a similar experience at a gig… I had 2 iPads using sync…. the second iPad is my backup device I take to gigs just in case something happens to my main iPad.

The first sign of trouble was lyrics/chords missing in a song I play at every gig….. was okay when I played the last gig. Next problem was an entire song missing….. no trace of it in the Song list.

I connected my iPad to the internet via the venues WiFi and did a sync….. no change. I then installed a full backup from iCloud and I was able to complete the gig. I have turned off sync now as I don’t trust it and can’t have that happen at gigs.

Peter, will you please explain how sync works in terms of what gets synced and when…. also the time it should take for ST3 to find changes and install them. Is there a risk of a partial sync happening if the connection to iCloud being interrupted (or disconnected) during a sync? If there is an interruption to the iPad iCloud connection, is there a risk of the existing ST3 database being affected?

Thanks.

peter

I can't really explain the sync as most of the stuff is done by Apple in a box. Every change you make to the database is tracked automatically and replayed to the cloud once you are online.

What I built myself is the way files are synced as the Apple solution only tracks things in the database and not your audio files. Here you can press the Sync Now button. It will then compare all your files with the files in the Cloud and upload or download whatever is needed. Changes are tracked based on the file modification date. So whenever you change a file on one device it will be uploaded to the cloud.

From my experience the only thing that can screw this up badly is enabling Cloud Sync on a device. If that device already contains data, it will be uploaded as the iCloud Sync is not able to identify the same songs. Stage Traxx tries to do this after the sync but that is a very delicate operation that could easily delete the wrong duplicate (maybe the one missing recent changes).

So best practice is therefore to reinstall the app before enabling Cloud Sync. That will ensure that there is nothing in the database that could mess up Cloud data.

SansMuso

peter

Another question, please Peter…. while again trying to get sync to work again, I receive an “Error code 2” message in the sync/date/time line…. what does that mean please? Thanks.

peter

No, all changes are tracked in the database and will be uploaded once you are online again. The only way to get the database to a clean state before activating Cloud is to reinstall the app on iOS/iPadOS or delete the data folder ~/Library/Containers/de.dikant.stagetraxx3 on macOS.

Another way that works well:

Create a full backup file in Stage Traxx
Activate Cloud Sync on all your devices
Restore the backup on one device

profcyclist

peter thank you so much! Your support for your product is amazing.

SansMuso

richietruman
Another question I meant to ask, Peter…… does ST3 auto sync with the online database (perhaps when you start the App up), or does it only pull any db changes (made on another db connected device) when you do a manual sync? Thanks.

peter

SansMuso Another question I meant to ask, Peter…… does ST3 auto sync with the online database (perhaps when you start the App up), or does it only pull any db changes (made on another db connected device) when you do a manual sync? Thanks.

It will sync automatically when you start the app and it does receive push notifications from the cloud while ST3 is running whenever another device changes something in the cloud.

SansMuso while again trying to get sync to work again, I receive an “Error code 2” message in the sync/date/time line

Error code 2 means that some (not all) operations in the cloud database failed. This could be caused by different things:

Network connectivity issues
No more space in iCloud
Concurrent changes to the database from another device
Throttling due to too many requests in a short time

If you can eliminate the first two bullet points, this issue will resolve itself automatically after a while.

SansMuso

peter Many thanks, Peter. I will persevere…. I must get this working as it will be very useful. I will just keep doing regular backups to load if something goes wrong with the online db.

peter

The more backups the better. I always create a new backup when I made some bigger changes. And as a fallback my iPad does automatic iCloud backups whenever it is charging.