Cannot load Project

[Ivonne Alemany]

Hi Tim - A colleague has been working on a document and I sync up to access from SVN. As I tried to open the project this week, I have an error message from Help & Manual saying the working copy database at my machine location is corrupt. I went see the topics file and found it is the Initialize.xml. see attachments. What do you recommend I do? The colleague has left the organization.
The document has over 400 pages in PDF - many topics.
Appreciate your help very much!
IA

[Tim Green]

Hi Ivonne,

Your screenshot shows that your project is stored in a OneDrive managed cloud folder. This is a serious error. You can store backups of your projects there but you should never ever try to edit your projects in a managed cloud folder like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc. If you are also putting your working copy of an SVN-managed project there then that makes the problems created even worse.

Managed cloud folders have relatively primitive active management for changes in files that they try to synchronize across all the local copies in use and the main copy that they maintain in the cloud. If you combine this with Help & Manual's own document management and then also SVN's management you have the recipe for a disaster. If multiple people have been editing the same SVN-managed project in multiple copies of the cloud folder on multiple computers then the result will be a horrible tangled mess. These are things that should never ever be combined.

Your screenshots show what has been happening: The cloud folder management software has been merrily creating multiple numbered copies of your topic files every time they get edited. The error message shows that the cloud folder management software has successfully destroyed the SVN database references as a result of its attempts to "manage" what it has found.

To recover from this you are going to have to get your project out of the OneDrive folder and out of SVN. The SVN information will now be corrupt beyond repair and there will be no way to recover it. You will also need to create a new SVN repository for the project, because what is now there will probably also include all the garbage files and data generated by OneDrive.

1. Copy your entire project folder to a local folder outside of OneDrive.
2. Make a full backup of the new local folder.
3. Delete the [.svn] folder inside the new local copy (this unlinks the project from SVN -- all the SVN data, which is now corrupt, is stored there).
4. Open the \Topics folder in Windows Explorer and locate all the duplicate topic files with their sequential numbers. Make sure that the Modified date column is active so that you can see which one was modified most recently.
5. Move all the older copies to a backup folder and rename the newest one to the original name.
6. Repeat for all topic files with duplicates.

After this you should be able to open the project normally in Help & Manual. You will need to check whether all your data is still present in the topics where you deleted the multiple copies. If it isn't, you need to check the backed up copies to see if you can find what was missing there.

After this,m and once you are sure that your project is "clean" again, you can create a new SVN repository on the basis of the clean copy. Then please make sure that every user working on the project has their OWN working copy on a LOCAL drive. You should never ever have multiple users working on the same working copy and the working copies must never ever be on a network drive. They must be local.

[Ivonne Alemany]

hi, Tim - looks like I missed that important detail about not having working copy on OneDrive!
A couple of things:
The working copy on OneDrive was not shared with others. I only would open in Help & Manual and sync up to SVN after the author made changes on his working copy thru H&M.
I was able to get the SVN version to create a new working copy in my C:drive and opened in Help & Manual without errors!


I abandoned the working copy in OneDrive and synced up with the on in my C:drive. I didn't do major surgery on the 470-page doc.
Any thoughts or concerns you still have that I need to know?

Thank you,
IA

[Tim Green]

Hi Ivonne,

If it wasn't shared with others that is very good -- then the problems will be much smaller. What is happening will then just be the issues with multiple copies of topics created while you are working, and the fact that what OneDrive did messed up the SVN database settings. You would also have additional problems if you edited the same project in different OneDrive folders on different computers. That would be the same as sharing it with other users.

I abandoned the working copy in OneDrive and synced up with the on in my C:drive. I didn't do major surgery on the 470-page doc. Any thoughts or concerns you still have that I need to know?

The most important thing to check is possible multiple copies of files created by OneDrive. The one displayed in Help & Manual will be the one with the original name. You need to check if any of the others contain important data not in the active version, and delete them after checking. Make backups before doing this, of course.