PageFour Help - Archiving

No matter how careful you are with your computer, no matter how wary you are when it comes to deleting things, we all lose files or data at some point. You may have pressed delete instead of insert and pressed Yes on the dialog that followed without thinking about it, or your husband may have been playing PC Plumber and deleted files he should have known better than to touch.

But at some point, we all lose things, and you can bet the things we lose are the very things we absolutely need to have two weeks later.

PageFour archiving goes a long way to allowing easy recovery from these sorts of problems. It will not prevent you from deleting by mistake if you really want to delete, but it will make it possible to recover the missing page when you first notice it is missing months later.

To open the Archive Manager, click on the Archive Manager option on the Tools menu. The Archive Manager is a simple, straight forward dialog that even my uncle Patrick would understand. Well, maybe not, but I'm sure if I used lots of small words and colourful pictures it would all come together for him in the end.

The list on the left shows all the archives currently held in storage in date order. The most recent archive will always appear at the top of the list, with the date the archive was made. There are a number of different kinds of Archives that are stored here:

Auto archives. These are automatically created by PageFour every few days. The frequency of these auto archives can be changed by opening the Options dialog on the Tools menu, but the default is every seven days. Auto archives are also generated every time you do a roll back or an import, or perform a major action such as changing your password.

User defined archives. These can be created by you at any time. Simply go to the Tools menu, select Make Full Archive and enter a name for your archive. Creating a new archive is useful if you are about to make major changes to your notebooks - for example, deleting a number of pages or folders you feel you no longer want.

Partial Archives. Partial user defined archives are created by you when you select a number of individual pages, folders, or notebooks for archiving and use the Make Archive of Selected option on the Tools menu.

As the archive list grows over time, you may feel safe in removing old archives and simply maintain archives you have created yourself for one reason or another. This can easily be done by selecting the archive and clicking the Delete button.

The default number of archives stored is thirty, but this number can be increased to one hundred in the Options dialog on the Tools menu.

The full contents of an archive can be seen by double clicking on an archive in the list. This expands the archive in the same way as the main notebooks list, showing the notebooks in the archive, and the contents of whichever notebook you decide to open.

Clicking the Find button on the toolbar allows you to search for a page or folder within the archived Notebook. Unlike the Find facility in the main notebooks, the archive Find searches only a single notebook at a time.

Once you have made a decision to perform a roll back from the archive, you must then decide what form you wish the roll back to take. Do you wish to completely replace a particular notebook or notebooks with the contents of the archive you have selected? This is a drastic action and you would lose any changes you have made to the notebooks since the Archive was made.

Do you wish to roll back only a small number of pages or folders? This is far less drastic and if you do this you will be given the option of not overwriting existing pages with pages of the same name, but simply renaming them so both can exist side by side.

Completely replacing the specified notebooks is only advisable if the archive you are replacing it with is very recent. Perhaps you made the archive earlier in the day and have now decided to undo some large changes you have made to a notebook. You should first mark the notebook or notebooks for roll back by selecting them using the Select button, then press the Roll Back to Selected Notebooks button.

If you decide to only roll back a small number of pages or folders, these should be marked for roll back by selecting them in the same way.

You should then press the Roll Back Selected button.

The dialog that now appears gives you three options to chose from.

If you are doing a complete rollback to one or more notebooks, the first option Replace Selected Notebooks will be pre-selected. This completely removes notebooks with the same name as those you are rolling back to and replaces them with those form the archive. This option will not be available if you are rolling back to selected folders and pages, or rolling back to a partial archive. Unchecking this option will enable the further options below.

The second option: Do Not Overwrite Existing Pages will be the default option if you are rolling back a select few folders or pages, or rolling back to a partial archive. This means that if a page with the same name already exists in your current Notebook, the page from the archive will be written alongside it with a slightly different name, for example: "My page" and "My page ARCHIVE".

You will then be able to examine both side by side to determine which you wish to keep or how you may wish to go about merging them.

The final option: Overwrite Existing Pages will replace any pages with the same name with the corresponding page found in the archive. You would then lose any changes made to these pages in the current Notebook since the archive was made.

Once you have made your selection, click on the Perform Rollback button to run the retrieval and replacement process.

Before rolling back, a fresh archive is always taken automatically. This means that if you have made the wrong choice in how to roll back, you can always restore your notebooks to where they were before the rollback by performing a single complete rollback of all notebooks from the new latest archive at the top of the list.