My PINS bug or corrupt data

Dear Bucky

Thanks for the info. I am manually entering my Pins so when the file became wonky I reloaded my last saved (emailed to myself) version… but lost and had to recreate 8 hours of previously stored data. Lesson learned — now I am sending backups to myself every 30 minutes of data entry. So far… so good.

Best I can figger it was a corruption somewhere in a Pin, but not due to importing data, but perhaps some electrons flew to the wrong circuits on the crashes that still randomly occur.

I have a new iPad Air enroute from Apple and we will see if it may have been my iPad. Will report back at that time.

Terry

Well, I started this thread and feel a bit responsible, too, so as a way of giving back to a wonderful product I will share what I’ve learned through the school of hard knocks and trial and error.

I am a heavy user of Pocket Earth (PE). I am retired and travel extensively with an interest in little known, off the track, archaeological ruins (castle ruins, standing stones, henges, stone rows, stone circles). When I travel, I love the ability to have an off-line map that shows me in real time exactly where I am in relation to POIs and MyPins.

My wife and I have navigated all over rural Germany and Netherlands, the back roads of Ireland and dirt trails and jungle lanes on the Mayan Trail in Yucatan Mexico finding old ruins in the bush using only PE. We’ve needed no maps other than PE because PE renders all other maps unnecessary (although I do now have the Ordance Survey Maps on iPad for Britain).

I enter all of my POIs and Pins manually because I have been unable to find any databases to download the type of things that interest me. (If you know of any, please let me know!). The manual data entry process is at once tedious and captivating, like creating a treasure map. After I input my Pins and POIs for a region, only then select my lodging based on the beautiful visual I have of thousands of color coded PINs of where everything is in relation to everything else. It takes time, but I like to say that if I am not traveling, I am preparing for travel.

What I have learned is that when manually entering data, the entire GPX file can become corrupt in the wink of an eye, without me knowing it, and cause the program to crash when using the POI/PIN search function. The first time it happened, I had not exported myself a backup file for 20 hours of work – and had to recreate it all.

I have found only TWO solutions to a data corruption issue: (1) live without the search field function or (2) delete the entire corrupt file and import a clean backup saved version of the PIN/POI GPX data and start from that point. AS Bucky recommended, IT’S CRITICALLY IMPORTANT TO CREATE BACKUPS OF YOU DATA ROUTINELY AND REGULARLY as your POI/PIN files grow.

If a POI/Pin file becomes corrupt, you cannot just go back and delete recent entries one by one until the search function works again (I tried). Once a file is corrupt and your search engine crashes, it will ALWAYS be corrupt until you delete THE ENTIRE FILE. Like I said above, school of hard knocks.

To save my work in progress, I export a full copy of the GPX file every 20 to 30 minutes. I now have more than 250 “backups” of GPX files just for the data entry I am doing for the UK – but that represents perhaps 150 hours of data entry. It seems that I tend to corrupt my PIN/POI file about once every 10,000 keystrokes. I suspect it has something to do with inadvertently touching two commands simultaneously thereby creating a conflict and a “glitch” in the internal data which affects only the search field feature.

There is no way to know that data have become corrupt without regularly testing the POI/PIN search field to ensure it does not crash the program (I do it every 20 minutes or so). Testing the “search field” and exporting the GPX file to myself every 20-30 minutes is good insurance – something as simple as typing “castle” will tell me the data are okay – because if the file is corrupt, it will crash before I type the second letter. I now have 2500 manually entered POI/PINs — weeks of data entry. It takes me so long because I am a heavy user in the “notes” fields of each entry. I have experienced the “corrupt data search crash” issue 4 times in 4 weeks — about once a week. I simply delete all POI/PIN data from the program (takes me only 60 seconds to delete 2500 PIN/POIs) and import my last “exported-saved” file and start from there.

Yes, this is a work-around, but it is no different than saving a Word.doc of Excel.xls file as you work except there are a few more keystrokes involved. For the enormous benefits the program gives me for (only $10? is that really all I paid?) it’s worth it 10,000 times over.

If you are importing new data from another user or database, I recommend that you backup (export) your current data (GPX file) first with an export to yourself by email, then after the import of the new data immediately test the search function. All my past backups/exports are saved in my gmail account forever – it’s a reassuring feeling.

By the way, in my original posting I mentioned that I was getting a new iPad to see if that cured the problem. I received a new iPad Air that I now use exclusively for PE. It is much faster than my old data-filled early iPad generation model, and it reduced — but did not eliminate — the crashes, just made them less frequent.<br />
Hope this help.

From the Anza-Borrego desert in Southern California (but 13 weeks next summer in the UK)

Terry Hunefeld
Bio: http://tinyurl.com/Terry-Bio
http://www.tripadvisor.com/members/thunefeld

Hey GeoMagik Guys:

You guys ROCK! Thanks for working so hard on an upgrade.

Duh…. it never occurred to me that my crashes could be an Apple iOS8 issue, but now that you mention it my crashes did not begin to occur until in installed iOS8 on my first generation iPad. I can’t recall these issues when inputting my Netherlands, Germany, Mexico or Ireland data on earlier iOS versions. Sheesh!

I will patiently wait for PE 2.5, install it — and see if that cures my crash ills. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Thanks for all the work you do to create an invaluable tool that accomplishes so much, so easily, so intuitively.

Oh, and by the way, thanks for correcting my typo/brainfade slip on exporting backups. I do save the Pocket Earth Archive file to retain all the data — but inadvertently typed GPX. Yes, saving PE Archive files by exporting them regularly is the safe way to go. I like the comfort of knowing that I can lose my iPad or iPhone while traveling and have new PE maps with all my data up and running within 5 minutes of obtaining a replacement device.

Terry Hunefeld, California