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I've been using MobileSheets Pro on an Android Fire tablet for several years without having any problems until yesterday. I opened MS Pro and selected a song I wanted to work on and the PDF file for the music was gone. What I received instead was an error message that essentially said
" / (song name) .pdf does not exist". Where did they go? I clicked on several additional songs thinking maybe that one file had gotten corrupted but got the same error message on all of them. I found that all the PDF files for that library had disappeared and that library has over 350 songs in it !
The MP3 file for each song was still there so apparently only the PDF files were missing. I then ran the diagnostics to see if missing files or a broken file path was possibly the problem but the diagnostics didn't find anything. The only thing I could think of to do at this point would be to load a recent backup but I nearly lost it when I found that the blast time I ran a backup was over three months ago. Really stupid of me. I read in the manual that MS Pro creates its own time and date stamped automatic backups so I was now feeling much better about it all. There were two auto backups with April dates and four from March so I selected the most recent one in April and after being warned etc. clicked on ok and almost immediately a message came up that the backup had been restored but when I opened the library nothing had changed. No PDF's, so naturally I tried them all and got the same results. I then created another empty db library, selected it as the default, and went through all six auto backups again. Nothing. new db still empty.
Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone please help me before I pull the rest of my hair out?
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Is that exactly what the error message said? It just started with a slash with nothing before it? If so, that means the storage location is currently invalid for some reason. In that case, go to Settings->Storage->Set MobileSheets Storage Location, tap the SD card icon and then tap OK. It should set the storage location to the default (/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.zubersoft.mobilesheetspro/files) and if that is not what the current location is, it should repair things. The most important thing is to verify whether your files are actually missing from the storage location or not. So first, please let me know whether you were using the default storage location or a different one, and if you use a file browser to navigate to that location, are the PDFs still there? If so, that means we just need to repair the storage location in MobileSheetsPro and everything should work again. If the files are missing, we need to figure out why they were deleted off the device.
The automatic database backup/restore just restores mobilesheets.db which contains all of your songs, setlists, bookmarks, annotations, etc. It does not contain the actual PDFs themselves. You have to create a full library backup manually to save those. Backup files can be several gigabytes in size, so that is not something MobileSheetsPro will do automatically. I am going to add prompts for users to back up their libraries regularly though as I think that is important as most people do not create regular backups.
I really hope you didn't just get rid of all of the automatic database backups though - it's really important that you still have your most recent database loaded so that we can just repair the file paths, otherwise your library will have been permanently reset to an older point in time.
Mike
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(04-07-2022, 02:44 PM)Zubersoft Wrote: Is that exactly what the error message said? It just started with a slash with nothing before it? If so, that means the storage location is currently invalid for some reason. In that case, go to Settings->Storage->Set MobileSheets Storage Location, tap the SD card icon and then tap OK. It should set the storage location to the default (/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.zubersoft.mobilesheetspro/files) and if that is not what the current location is, it should repair things. The most important thing is to verify whether your files are actually missing from the storage location or not. So first, please let me know whether you were using the default storage location or a different one, and if you use a file browser to navigate to that location, are the PDFs still there? If so, that means we just need to repair the storage location in MobileSheetsPro and everything should work again. If the files are missing, we need to figure out why they were deleted off the device.
The automatic database backup/restore just restores mobilesheets.db which contains all of your songs, setlists, bookmarks, annotations, etc. It does not contain the actual PDFs themselves. You have to create a full library backup manually to save those. Backup files can be several gigabytes in size, so that is not something MobileSheetsPro will do automatically. I am going to add prompts for users to back up their libraries regularly though as I think that is important as most people do not create regular backups.
I really hope you didn't just get rid of all of the automatic database backups though - it's really important that you still have your most recent database loaded so that we can just repair the file paths, otherwise your library will have been permanently reset to an older point in time.
Mike
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Hi Mike, the full error code is ...
File /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.zubersoft.mobilesheetspro/files/song name/song name .pdf does not exist. This file path matches the MobileSheets storage path under the settings tab. I used an SD file manager to locate the storage directory and all the songs are there each one in its own folder. The contents of the folders vary. Some contain both the PDF file and the MP3 file, the majority contain just the Mp3 file, and some are just empty. There are also a dozen or so Mp3's, a few more PDF files, and two system generated backups at the bottom of the directory that aren't in folders. The auto backups are dated 4/5/22.
The other six system generated backups are still in advanced recovery folder.
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So please do me a favor - load one of your songs in MobileSheetsPro that is not loading properly, then check to see if the PDF exists using that SD file manager. If the PDF does not exist, then that's not something that MobileSheetsPro can recover from without a library backup file. I'm not sure what would have caused your files to vanish off the device though - that is very concerning. If you copy all of your PDFs into the storage location folder then use Settings->Other Settings->Fix Broken File Paths, that would repair the library in one shot.
Mike
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(04-08-2022, 03:05 AM)Zubersoft Wrote: So please do me a favor - load one of your songs in MobileSheetsPro that is not loading properly, then check to see if the PDF exists using that SD file manager. If the PDF does not exist, then that's not something that MobileSheetsPro can recover from without a library backup file. I'm not sure what would have caused your files to vanish off the device though - that is very concerning. If you copy all of your PDFs into the storage location folder then use Settings->Other Settings->Fix Broken File Paths, that would repair the library in one shot.
Mike
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Followed your direction Mike and the song PDF(s) weren't there. I tried several with no luck. There are songs that open in MS Pro correctly and I found that those do have a PDF in the song file but the majority of the PDF's aren't there. I add text notes to a lot of the PDF's stored in MS Pro like chord changes, what keyboard setting to use, riff notes etc so I've lost the text notes. I did manage to find an msb I had saved to a thumb drive back in Dec, 2021 and I knew that should have a lot of these notes up to that point so I restored it. That helped. Now only the notes from last Dec to March have to be added again. There are still songs it can't find but I can try reloading those again from Dropbox. Something new is MS Pro adding extra pages to a song file that doesn't have more than one or two pages to it. mostly those with 2 or more pages. The notation at the top of page 1 will say 1 of 3 for example and there isn't a 3rd page to the song. I configured the db to go back to page 1 on a swipe or tap and page 3 will open instead. The error message on page 3 just says it can't find the page.
Would you recommend reinstalling a clean copy of MS Pro ?
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I don't think reinstalilng MobileSheetsPro will change anything in regards to that problem. If you want to export one of those songs as a .msf, I can take a look at it to see what is going on. MobileSheetsPro must either think there is a missing file (which you would see if you edited the song) or it thinks one of the files has more pages than it really does (which would mean the page order for a file is incorrect). Do these songs have multiple PDFs in them?
Mike
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