more undo´s

DTP (even DTP Office) lacks another essential (profi)feature: “undo” at least 100…

wolfgang
I vote for less scripts and more real features

100 undos? lol.

That’s ridiculous.

Why?

wolfgang

Undos can be dangerous, too, unless you remember what you are undoing. :slight_smile:

I’ve got a word processor that brags about the fact that it has unlimited undos. Sounds good, but I really have to check carefully if I try to go back as many as 3 or 4 undos. As a practical reality, it’s best to make a backup before reverting several states backwards in the document. :slight_smile:

Until undos (or Leopard’s Time Machine) arrives, I highly recommend running DT Pro’s Backup Archive before making significant changes in a database. You can find it in DT Pro’s Scripts > Export > Backup Archive. It does multiple things: checks for/repairs errors, optimizes the database then makes both an internal and an external backup. Now one can screw up with impunity.

I m mostly “undooing” faults errors.
Backup Archive is not a replacement for undos. Thats completly different animals. ( Im dooing a daily backup I dont want to complicate that with another special backup only for DTP)

The real problem for me is not 100, 500 or unlimitied undos, its that we have still not one! Thats really dangerous!
wolfgang

Having to make a backup and re-open it in case of an error seems to me as a very poor solution. And certainly not one which is acceptable for a high-quality product such as DT! Most programs have the undo function integrated and I never thought it was “dangerous” in any way. Just extremely helpful and time-saving.

I didn’t say or imply that backing up is a substitute for Undo. I said “in the meantime…”

And afterwards, too. Assume that you’ve got multiple Undos. Assume that you have a retrievable Trash. Assume that you have Time Machine. Assume that you run automatic nightly backups of your computer to an external drive. Now think about all the possibilities that could still result in data loss, from human error (still lots of possibilities), to software and operating system errors, to hardware failure, to theft of your laptop, to a fire in your home or office.

There will always be actions that you can’t Undo (ever seen that message in the Finder?). It will always be possible to make a dumb decision when using Undo.

That’s why I like Backup Archive. When I’ve been making substantial changes to my database (and before that, when I’m planning major organizational changes) I’ll invoke it and take a coffee break. Backup Archive will check for and repair errors, optimize the database and make current internal and external backups. I don’t depend on scheduled backups. Depending on what I’m doing, I may run Backup Archive several times in a day, or not run it for several days.

Please note that I haven’t had to resort to a backup for a bit over two years at this point. But the habit of making backups is really important. It’s comforting to know that if I do something really dumb, I’ve protected myself by having a very recent state of the database to which I can revert. Even Time Machine can’t be that protective, as nice as it will be.

I’m under the impression that we are talking about different things.

I know that backups are GOOD and that not backing up is BAD. Thank you very much. And I back up my databases. Thank you very much. And having done that, I STILL regret the absence of a very common feature (i.e. Undo) in DT Pro. How insolent is that?

Having all the different ways that you suggest to recover my lost/misplaced/whatever data doesn’t change the fact that minor errors could be corrected by a minor feature. Having to use a back up because I put a file or a batch of files in the wrong DT group seems to me like using a tank to get rid of a mosquito… But I’ll be patient with my mosquito untill this ‘not so useful’ undo feature appears in DT.

Oh, and by the way, you forgot global nuclear war in your list of events which should oblige me to restore my DT Pro database…

I also miss multiple undos in DevonThink.

I am intelligent enough to handle their “dangerous” aspects :wink: .

Maria

Also don’t forget: the key with multiple/umlimited undo’s is to have a redo.

I never said that Undo/Redo is a bad idea, or that Undo (or an alternative protective measure for a particular operation) won’t be available in a future release.

It’s currently possible to accidentally delete a group or a text-type file (including HTML files), with no recovery. That will not be the case when version 2.0 is released. At the moment, a current backup is the best workaround.

An assistant once created chaos in doing some last minute editing of a legislative report, by getting confused in running through a series of Undos/Redos while trying to rewrite a paragraph. He then printed the report and closed the document. Few applications maintain complete versioning of previous states of a file after the file is closed. So we had to recreate a major section of the report before submitting it. Never underestimate the potential of human error, even when using techniques designed to mitigate against error. Yes, I’ve done dumb things, too.

Would it be feasible to create versioning of a big DT Pro database down to the level of a hundred Undos? Not practically, as the file size and memory requirements could be unmanageable for most users. The Finder file size of my main database is currently over 4 GB. But as I use it as the collection vehicle for thousands of files that are moved to other databases and then deleted from the main database, think of the total versioning size. Not just pointers, but actual files would have to be recoverable in true versioning.

I’m hopeful that Time Machine, a Leopard feature, will be useful to me. But as I often work on a laptop and don’t carry around a large external drive, there will be gaps in its functionality.

Current backups will always be the best protection, given potential errors in using other protective measures.

Will 2.0 address the issue raised by ordha?

That’s the problem I run into time and time again – and restoring from a backup would not help here.

P.S. On another issue, I see the forum FAQs say one can subscribe to a topic by clicking on a subscribe link, but I don’t see that link. Where is it and what does it look like?