Refreshment that's hazardous to your (data) health! *not spam*

[gazumped 10,405]

I recently had cause to reboot a Windows 8 laptop using the Change Settings option "Refresh your PC without affecting your files".

 

Long story short,  there was an OS issue which made it unusable without a serious house clean,  and those nice folks at Dell suggested a Refresh would be a good idea.

 

According to the Win 8 settings "If your PC isn't running well,  you can refresh it without losing your photos, music, videos and other personal files" (my italics)

 

So I went ahead and did that - and lost Evernote and my database folder.

 

As far as I can tell all my other data files are still there (I had rather a lot - it'll take weeks to notice if there are more problems) but all the apps that I had installed,  from Chrome to XnView are gone.

 

OK - I can live with that.  It's a bear having to reinstall,  reauthenticate and glue everything back together,  but as long as I have my data... and I just had to rebuild everything anyway on a(nother) laptop I bought as an emergency backup device.  I kept a list,  with links (guess where).

 

Sadly the same can't be said for my database - even with hidden folders on show,  there's no AppData folder for /Evernote/Evernote to be inside - I guess because I have no apps either.  While I can re-download the synced database,  I had some stuff in a local notebook too which was a bit critical...

 

Well I also had a backup,  so no long-term hassles;  but it still puts a(nother) crimp in your day.

 

Still the moral of this story is:  if you refresh your Win 8 setup for any reason,  you really REALLY need a backup of your database.

 

Major HT to the Evernote Devs however - when I had less than my current database-full of notes and last tried the download-from-scratch route,  it took about a week to get all my notes back.  I've now done two rebuilds in a week and I reckon it takes about 8-10 hours (17,000 notes).  That's a vast improvement on previous performance,  and (almost) takes all the sting out of reinstalling!  Thanks guys!