I wanted to share my experience of losing the BLOC project file for the most important Blocs project I’ve ever worked on — BlocsMaster.com
I dedicated months to this project, replacing Podia with the built-in Sitelok solution and self-hosting videos, among other things.
Tragically, I lost the file because it was somehow overwritten during iCloud syncing with the much older version (which had the same name). This week, I had to reinstall the system, and I noticed that the file was an extremely old version. I’ll need to recreate this website, likely from scratch.
Anyway, I strongly advise against relying solely on iCloud. Always ensure that you back up your important files!
Something similar has happened to me before, and it’s extremely frustrating…
I’ve kept iCloud turned off ever since.
The built-in backup feature in Blocs is set to “every 5 minutes,” and on top of that, ARQ Backup regularly saves the project data to external cloud storage and to a server folder on the local network. Especially in the final stages of a project, when there are still lots of little details to tweak, you really don’t need that kind of thing.
I’m so sorry Eldar as I’m sure that’s enough to wreck your weekend. For a second I wasn’t sure I was in the right place as in one of my coding forums this is unfortunately a semi-regular topic for projects.
Any chance that you might have other devices that sync with iCloud that might be offline? You could try ensuring they stay offline (quickly turn off Wi-Fi, Cellular, etc.) to keep them from syncing and try and recover the correct file(s) before they get overwritten.
Might be good opportunity to investigate a long term backup strategy. I’m fond of something that’s automatic and is on-site (quick & close to bare metal recovery) as well as off-site (just in case there’s a on-site disaster like a fire).
I love the iCloud Drive, and nothing like that has ever happened to me before.
But yeah, I will definitely be much more careful going forward.
What could have saved me is if Blocs had a backup to iCloud instead of locally. I could browse and restore the previous versions of the documents and files that support this feature (like Pages, etc). Perhaps @norm could work his magic to implement this functionality for Blocs projects in the future, especially since we have Blocs for iPad.
Yeah, I don’t have time to work on rebuild of this website right away, and thankfully the live version works great for now, just can’t update it in any meaningful way until I create the new BLOC project file.
Any chance that you might have other devices that sync with iCloud that might be offline?
That was the first thing I checked. I actually lost the file because I opened it on the iPad, and then the syncing somehow messed up the dates. As a result, I ended up with the file, which says the ‘last modified date’ is in the future (in June). It’s crazy how that happened, but the result is that every version I saved before that was dismissed. Now, I’m stuck with the Blocs Master project from years ago, which says it was saved 2 months in the future
This is EXACTLY what I did. I back up to this external drive while using blocs, and every night Carbon Copy Cloner makes yet another back of all of my web files.
I’ve seen too many issues with iCloud Drive to use it for much. Using other Cloud storage options may also have challenges. For example I’m using pCloud, works quite well. But make sure you save to a regular APFS or HFS+ folder that’s synced (instead of directly to pCloud’s own filesystem). When I saved to pCloud’s own filesystem (not sure if their current version is built upon FUSE, like previous versions), the backups Blocs made, grew the resource fork part to 4.4 GB for every project backup file. So even if the project was 3 MB the backup files used lots of gigabytes.
