One of my screens with a ton of code under it has been lost.
I was able to get to a screen that showed "previous releases" but that seems to ne gone too.
How do I recover a lost screen?
Mike
Can you clarify what you mean by lost?
Do you mean a retool app "screen" or a page in retool admin?
Have you checked the trash for your app or used the search tool for the app name?
i have lost the App called Invoices02.
I have found this file in the Trash but it is a very old version.
It would take a lot of effort to get the Trash version up to date.
Is there any way of possibly recovering a more recent version?
Mike
every time you publish a release it'll be stored in the retool version history - perhaps the file that's been put into trash has also been reverted to an older revision?
Without knowing how it's been lost/trashed or how you have versioned your app it'll be hard to advise on "recovering" the version.
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It would appear from now on that I will have to make my own backups.
I wish I knew about this before I signed on.
Mike
Knew about what? I'm not sure what you mean and I'm not sure how retool could do more:
- Any version of an app that you create is stored in the release history
- Every change you make to an app is visible in the change history
- Deleting an app only moves it to the trash folder, from where it can be restored or permanently removed
Does someone else have access to your domain, perhaps they removed it or renamed the app you've "lost"?
I am the only one who accesses Retool for my company.
One day Invoice02 came up blank. I was able to find a Release Screen which showed listings for at least 20 previous releases. But each release I accessed also went blank.
This is not something I caused.
I don't know if you are an employee of retool or another user like me.
I think there is a problem with Retool's backup storage.
I don't know if you have any influence with bringing attention to this. Clearly this needs attention.
Mike
Scott:
I was able to find a file that I sent to Trash several months ago. I has able to restore it and I got most of it rebuilt last night.
Fortunately I had copied some key parts of the code to other screens and I was able to copy it back.
I am going to look at copying all my screen files to a folder on GoDaddy which backs up my files daily.
I do think this deserves some investigation.
Mike
Hi @mdsmith1
Thanks for posting about this! I'm so sorry to hear that this happened 
Do you still have the blank version of Invoice02? I'm not sure why that happened, as I haven't found any similar reports of this issue yet, but I'm happy to take a look.
Also, were other apps affected or just this one? What was the last date available in the previous releases section?
In general, Retool maintains a history of app saves, but here are some actions I'd recommend if you see a blank app unexpectedly:
1). Check to see if Retool is experiencing an outage
2). Check the browser console for errors
3) Step back in the recent history of your app to see if a past page save is working better. Stepping through the page saves is helpful because they save automatically & happen much more often than the releases you may have manually created in the release management feature.
To use this history feature, append ?_historyOffset=5 (you can choose any number, but I'm using 5 as an example) to the end of your app url. This will allow you to "travel back in time" 5 steps. You can increase the number to go further back in time if you still don't see what you're looking for. The idea here is to go back to the most recent working version (lowest # possible) so you don't have to redo as much work (going back 1000 steps would likely show data, but it could be many, many changes behind). ***WARNING!*** If you make any changes to the canvas when traveling back in time, that past version will become your present version and it messes with the history, so be careful not to touch anything! Once you find a version that isn't crashing and you'd like to make that your present version, then you can make an edit to the canvas (move a component, add a component, etc) to persist that view.
As an aside, Enterprise teams that need more extensive functionality beyond our release management feature, should consider using source control to manage their apps.
Tess:
I know I saw a series of previously saved versions of my lost file but they eventually disappeared.
I can 't remember how I got the previous versions to come up.
What are the steps to do that?
Mike
Tess and Scott:
I referred my problem to Retool Support. A lady named Nica helped me.
It turns out that Version Backups must be saved manually.
The steps are:
- open the App
- click on the 3 dots in the upper right (you can also click "latest" in the lower left.)
- click on "Releases and History"
- click on "Create New"
- follow the prompts
I don't know if this is well known to most users.
I checked the docs and it is well documented but it seems like a feature that needs to be discovered.
I will mark this as a solution.
Mike
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Thank you for circling back here @mdsmith1
I have flagged to our team internally that this is an area for improvement in both functionality and discoverability. Hopefully, we can work on some improvements soon!
Tess:
Yes, I received a nice note from Kayla Bauhaus from the Support Group and she also posted her note to this Community.
Mike
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