pdf corruption on EN v10 windows desktop

[idoc 413]

Maybe this is a fluke but I'm bringing it up because I've never seen it before.  My workflow involves taking pdf's in EN notes and adding to them on a continuous basis.  For example, I may have a pdf on credit card expenses for 2022 and every month using Adobe Acrobat I splice onto it the statement for that month.  Some of these pdfs have 10 years of information through this gradual addition process.  This has worked flawlessly for me for over 10 years.  Recently I switched entirely to v10 and I have just noticed something I've never seen before.  A large pdf containing many years worth of data has just become corrupted.  The entire data from 2023 has been lost (or is showing up simply as page numbers with no pages).  I can't save the file to another location which means I can't really work with it to try to figure out how to recover the data ("Document could not be saved.  There was a problem reading this document.") I can open the file, read the first 411 pages and nothing after that.  Through Legacy I have dealt with thousands of files over the last 10-12 years and have never seen this.  What is concerning to me is whether or not this could occur with other pdf files or if this is somehow related to the fact that I upgraded to v10 and to win10 (from Legacy and win7).  I have tried to open the file on other machines and same story.  So far, this is the only pdf file that I have seen this with but my entire work flow could be impacted if I see more instances of this.  I may need to be creating 400 separate notes, each one containing a pdf, rather than risking years of data on pdfs that get corrupted.  Again, not sure if this is a one time hit or if I need to start offloading all of these pdfs into online storage.  Not even sure how to do this since these pdfs change constantly as I add to them.

[idoc 413]

Related question: Last month I did an export of the enex file from the notebook in which the corrupted file is in.  I sent it to Gdrive.  It's possible that the information I'm looking for is still uncorrupted in that file.  How do I take that enex file and reconstitute it in a separate notebook so that I can look for that pdf file?  Wasn't that the point of carefully creating enex backups and storing them offline?  Would love to learn if this foresight helps save the day.

[gazumped 12,075]

Just now, idoc said:

How do I take that enex file and reconstitute it in a separate notebook

Should simply be a question of importing notes from that file.  I'd suggest you do a 10-note test first though - export a small number of notes to Enex and then step through the process of importing back from that file.  From memory importing does store notes in a new notebook,  but you'd have a terrible clean-up issue if it didn't..

And - contact Support!

[agsteele 3,061]

Before doing that I'd check the note in the web client. It is conceivable that the local version of the PDF only is damaged. Check that the PDF sync has happened.

Assuming you are on a paid subscription you have the note history running and could open an early copy of the note which should contain the earlier PDF too.

[Feitz 264]

37 minutes ago, idoc said:

How do I take that enex file and reconstitute it in a separate notebook so that I can look for that pdf file?

You could import it into any app that understands ENEX files, e.g. Apple notes (no tags), Bear or my personal favourite Keep It. This should at least let you recover your PDF. And keep the backup ENEX safe...

[idoc 413]

agsteele you are a genius!!  This solution worked perfectly.  All the data has been restored.  Prior to this I had succeeded in using a third party program to "Repair pdf" but that simply resulted in a properly functioning pdf file with the entire year's worth of data still not there.  Your solution has solved the problem.  Thank goodness for the "history" that is saved.  One more great reason why people should pay for this service and not gripe about it.  The pittance that I paid for my subscription has just saved me dozens of hours of data reconstruction in a crucial file.  However, just out of interest I will also make sure I understand the process of using stored enex files to reconstitute data.

[PinkElephant 8,838]

Just a remark: Note history is running for all accounts, in the background.

The subscription is only needed to unlock access to it, and be able to restore. Good it saved your day - did the same for me several times.