I just lost everything

Bike Outliner
1

I’m not sure what happened, I spent hours working on a document that was saved on icloud.
I was missing some formatting features with markdown copy-pasting, so I started to write an e-mail and it led me to discover this support page.
BTW, I’ve searched the “guide” for a while from the app.

I saw that there is a Bike 2.0 preview. I closed the first app, which asked me if I want to save my file. I was pretty sure the main one was saved and it was about a new tab I used to format some markdown correctly before inserting it. So I clicked Delete.

I kept both version of Bike, opened them, there is nothing anymore.
Could we have a versioning or auto-save feature avoiding this?
I obviously made a mistake but I lost everything in one or two actions.

Cheers

2

I just lost everything

Ugh, sorry to hear that. Very frustrating to say the least.

I closed the first app, which asked me if I want to save my file. I was pretty sure the main one was saved and it was about a new tab I used to format some markdown correctly before inserting it. So I clicked Delete.

All the document saving behavior is implemented in Apple’s framework code. It’s standard behavior that Apple provides and apps really aren’t supposed to deviate from it, that would just confuse things further.

At the same time it’s a complex system and the saving behavior changes based on some system settings, also (maybe?) on if you are saving to iCloud or not.

Could we have a versioning or auto-save feature avoiding this?

Generally Apple’s document saving behavior does provide autosave, but I think you found a corner of behavior where that autosave doesn’t apply.

I think I recreated the situation you ran into, and so far I haven’t been able to recover the deleted content, but just in case you can try:

  1. Look in trash
  2. Open iCloud Drive - Apple iCloud and look in recently deleted
  3. Spotlight search for any unique terms that were in your document. When you search in the spotlight popup use content: myuniqueterm. You shouldn’t need to do that, but for me spotlight has become quite unreliable unless I search using the content attribute.

Can you try to recreate the scenario with a temp document? It would be useful to know exactly what you did so we can better understand the behavior and make sure there isn’t a bug in Bike somewhere.

Also what system setting do you have for:

  • “Ask to keep changes when closing documents”
  • “Close windows when quitting an application”

Was this a new document that you had never explicitly saved? I think I can recreate the behavior that you saw by:

  1. Create a new document
  2. Edit that document a lot (don’t quit Bike or save document explicitly)
  3. Close document window
  4. It will ask you if you want to delete… and then it deletes

Does that sound like what happened?

3

Forgot to mention … one more thing to try is recreate the problem in TextEdit with a plain text file. Bike should the same behavior that TextEdit has in this case. If you see a difference in behavior please let me know, maybe Bike has a bug or should adjust its behavior.

4

Hello Jesse, thank you for your kind answer and sorry for the late reply I’m exhausted.
I’m unable to remember what happened but I have some ideas.

  • I might have indeed believed the document was saved like in workflowy.
  • I’m sure I have been confused by something that happened again : when I want to create a new document, I use CMD+N, and it opens again the tutorial with the same name. It’s an unexpected behavior for me as I already saw the tutorial as a user.
    By default it names the new file “Welcome to Bike”, and I might have not checked because of getting used to autosave and autoname with google docs.
    So what could have happen is that I had two tabs open named Welcome to Bike. The first one was my main doc (maybe I saved it), the second one was a test to remove markdown formatting copy pasted from Claude AI. I might have done something like write on top of one file with the “Welcome to Bike already exists” function.

Sorry if it’s unclear, I wanted to make sure to answer on time as you took time to try to understand my issue. I shouldn’t have assumed autosave.