I just recently noticed corruption in two of my rich text DTpro notes. These two notes were VERY similar, and in both cases the corruption involved text whose font/style was Minion Pro regular, 12.0 pt, Text Color: gray, Text Strikethrough: single. The text color and strikethrough was originally set (probably years ago…) via a saved system text style I named “disabled”. In both cases, the corrupt text started with whitespace followed by a bullet (“•”, typed via option-8) character, followed by the text.
In some cases, the bullet and following space character were replaced by the capital-pi (“?”, typed via option-shift-p) or cent (“¢”, typed via option-4) character and a capital “U”…
In other cases, large strings of odd junk was inserted in the note… In one case, this odd junk increased this file’s size from about 800KB to over 15,000KB (resulting in a significant DTpro slowdown).
I’m not sure what triggered the issue, but it may have involved me switching from the “U.S.” to the “U.S. Extended” Keyboard Input Type. I switched back a few days ago, though, and by checking my backups I know the notes were corrupted sometime between 9/1 and 9/8. As far as I can tell, only two of my (700+) notes were affected, and both were rich text notes with this specific text style and “whitespace + bullet” starting text. The text corrupted was text I entered long ago (in July 2005 as you can see below), but it was fine until sometime in the last week or so… Other text in these same notes both of which were large (350+KB or so) was unaffected!
Apparently, DTpro’s database itself wasn’t corrupted and it verifies fine via Tools ? Verify and Repair (which I do every Saturday morning during my backups).
An example of the original text:
and its corrupted version:
When I restored the corrupted text from a backup file, DTpro would consistently (and quickly) re-corrupt it be changing the "• " to “? U” or “¢ U” as I mentioned above. Once I removed the “strikethrough” part of the text style, I was able to restore the text and it seems to be remaining uncorrupted, so the probably definitely appears to be related to the “strikethrough” text style and possible the bullet character…
I cannot send you my DTpto database as it contains sensitive data, but will be happy to help regress and debug this issue, as it has me VERY concerned about the integrity of the data I have stored in DTpro…