Data recovery if crash during saving

[leonhandreke]

I experienced data loss today. I edited a note with vim, saved and quit, and when I came back to sncli, the UI was frozen. I quit sncli with Ctrl+C and my edit was lost.

This should never happen, there should be some sort of data recovery mechanism that ensures that after I have saved the file in vim, I can be sure not to lose its contents. I've lost data in the past due to my computer running out of battery while still editing the note (despite having saved it).

[samuelallan72]

sncli creates a temporary file and passes that to the editor when you edit a note. This temporary file is then deleted once the editor closes and sncli saves the note. In late september ( https://github.com/insanum/sncli/commit/c233663028e4a593aaad283ba91e95d16a649ad8 ), the cfg_tempdir option was added which allows you to put the temporary directory somewhere persistent on disk so you can recover the note in the case of a lockup or shutdown.

[leonhandreke]

Thanks for the quick reply, I set it to ~/.cache/sncli, so next time this happens I'll be able to recover the data. I'm still thinking about whether this could be fixed in a more user-friendly way. Some ideas I had so far:

• By default, set cfg_tempdir to the cache directory according to the XDG spec.
• Use the note id as the filename, allow restoring from it at startup (but what happens with multiple instances then?)
• Sync to the notes database while the note is being edited. This would also fix that I have to quit my editor to actually see the results on my phone.

Since the problem is fixed for me personally, I'll close this issue for now. Thanks for your help!

[samuelallan72]

@leonhandreke glad that fixes it for you! :)

Technically at the moment cfg_tempdir not a cache; it's purely a temporary place to store note content currently beiing edited - a communication between the editor and sncli. It's currently not possible to sync during editing with the current architecture. The running of the editor blocks sncli (no parallel processing).

It would seem to me that to support multiple sncli instances, sync while editing, etc., it would require a different architecture of the entire program, and a different method of storing note data on disk. :\