RELOADING - PLEASE HELP

[Douglas-Taylor]

Greetings
I had to replace my internal hard drive, but kept all the programmes to reinstall/upload later. I have now copied the qiqqa folder across to the new drive, but when I open the app there is nowhere to sign in and I am treated as a new user (without access to all my libraries). How do I access the sign-in screen?

[GerHobbelt]

? There's no sign-in screen in the open source releases of Qiqqa - that was a feature of the old commercial version, but that one is defunct for a while now.

When you open a freshly installed Qiqqa v80 - v83 application and your libraries are missing and you have forgotten where your Qiqqa "data directory" is located, the safest approach is the following:

the idea here is to keep your original data untouched until you are sure the transition has completed satisfactory.
Hence we're going to locate the original data directory tree and copy it over to the new spot. That way, if anyway went wrong, we still have the original data directory tree, untouched, ready for a second attempt.

1. locate your currently active Qiqqa data directory. The quickest way to do this is to start the Qiqqa application and look at the start dialog: it's the Qiqqa Base Path:

   

   Note that path and close the Qiqqa application: make sure it is not running while you execute the following steps of the procedure below.

2. Open Windows Explorer and browse to that directory. You now see something like this:

   

   If you look in the Guest subdirectory you'll see a file set like this:

Note the Qiqqa.library file in there; we're going to look for the old one(s) next!

3. use Windows Explorer to search your disks for the file named Qiqqa.library; you should find one or more of those: each "Qiqqa library" has one!

   The key to recovering an arbitrary Qiqqa Data directory is finding it's Guest/Qiqqa.library database and the surrounding structure, so you must discover the location of your previously active library set.

   As an example, here's a screenshot of a older data directory of mine:

   

   Note that I show the Guest subdirectory here, which has a Qiqqa.library database file, among other stuff. The important goods for that particular are in there, including your PDF collection deeper inside the accompanying documents subdirectory. WE NEED ALL OF THAT AND ARE GOING TO COPY IT TO THE NEW SPOT NEXT.

4. As the above was only the Guest library and we want *everything from the old disk/machine, we go one directory UP, as shown below:

   

   Observe that I moved UP one directory level here, compared to the previous screenshot. This was the old Qiqqa data base directory. My screenshots are from a small test set, so don't be surprised when your Qiqqa data base directory contains several more subdirectories next to Guest: Qiqqa creates one (UUID-named) subdirectory for each library you ever created, so there may be many in there.

5. The quickest way to SELECT ALL and COPY them to the new location is using keyboard shortcuts in Windows Explorer: Ctrl+A selects all:

   

   then hitting Ctrl+C instructs Windows Explorer to register the entire selected directory tree in the clipboard...

6. switch to the new Qiqqa data root directory, which you looked at in step 2 above. Click anywhere in the empty space in that directory to activate the window:

   

   and then use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V to PASTE (= COPY) the entire Qiqqa data tree from the old place into the new location on your new disk. Windows Explorer may pop up a dialog asking you whether it should overwrite some of the files and folders in this destination: choose to OVERWRITE as you want an exact copy of the old data to appear here and the initial/dummy empty database file, etc. from the fresh install to go away.

7. Once this copy is completed, you can restart Qiqqa, which will still point to the new data directory tree; when you then continue to start the Qiqqa application it will take a while "discovering" the new library set and library content, so this might take a while for large libraries to finish the start-up process, but after a while the usual Qiqqa library view screen should pop up and show your libraries.

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Extras / In case of .... / Known Issues

• when you find multiple locations where a Guest/Qiqqa.library library file exists, each of these MAY be a candidate for a recovery like the above; check the last-changed date/timestamp for the .library files to get an idea which one might be the one you used last.

  This sort of thing can happen when you have recovered from previous Qiqqa / machine rebuilds and is unusual - for those who visit later and have been "playing" with Qiqqa installs like that, this can occur, but this is a rare scenario: most users will not encounter this issue. (Qiqqa BACKUP files and EXPORT TREES have different library database filenames (with .s3db file extensions) so there shouldn't be any confusion about any of those, if you ever created backups or exports like that.

• When manually recovering like this, it's best practice to first delete all files and directories in the TARGET (=NEW) Qiqqa data root directory, so the Ctrl+V PASTE/COPY won't see anything old that must be overwritten; this cleanup-before-copy also prevents mixing partially new and old data in the same library, ensuring the Qiqqa application cannot get confused. In the procedure above I didn't mention this as we can get away without this extra cleanup step when overwriting a new and still empty Qiqqa database/library tree; Qiqqa only drops two sample/introduction documents in the Guest library on first install and those are harmless.

• when you come from older Qiqqa versions, it might be necessary to rebuild the index for the library/libraries next; that can be done in the Qiqqa options screen later on, if you find this is necessary.

• ditto for dubious/suspect OCR (conversion-to-text) results for old PDFs; this advice generally only applies for folks storing older PDFs and/or collecting old documents (like yours truly), where the document PDF is image-based, rather than text-based. You'll very probably already know you're one of those PDF 'victims' as the test search and text marking/copy/paste functions in Qiqqa will not work for such PDFs. Generally speaking, modern academic papers from Arxiv, Springer, etc.etc. will be text-based and you're not facing this issue. It doesn't impact the manual recovery process per se but when you happen to have upgraded your Qiqqa application along the way without realizing, this may bite your buttocks: re-index is in order and Qiqqa will probably be very busy re-running the OCR process in the background for a long while afterwards...