10 years of Groups of posts gone, server config gone as well

[lance317]

Hello, I'm a registered user of v 5.59, and am having a big panic here...

An hour ago I successfully used my Newsbin for about a half hour. I then closed Newsbin.

Reopened 20 minutes and all groups, server info, and posts are gone. 10+ years worth.

The nbi file in the Newsbin directory now has a creation date from the last hour.

Is there anyway possible to recover any of this? I fear that I won't even be able to re-download the 10+ year old posts, let alone my bookmarked files I made through a number of custom groups

Thanks for any help

[Quade]

Newer versions allow you to restore the configuration using the Options menu. You might want to look there. I don't remember if 5.59 supported that. It's pretty old.

More than likely the problem is simply that the NBI got wiped. The actual group data is probably still there. If you re-create the configuration, use exactly the same server name, then add the groups, you ought to be able to just load the groups up normally.

I can't promise you that you can recover everything. It's a good idea to backup the NBI file from time to time. 6.81 does this automatically.

[lance317]

thanks for the quick reply Quade. I've been using your software since the mid-2000s and this is the first problem i've ever had.

What's unusual at this point is that I have a full copy of my "working" Newsbin App Data folder - groups and all - and the nbi file - in a saved Shadow Copy on my computer...

However when I copy the files from the Shadow Copy and then launch Newsbin, it gives me a "can't write to test app data folder" and then overwrites the saved nbi file from the Shadow Copy.

Furthermore, when I try to open the Shadow Copy of the nbi file in Wordpad it comes up as blank - yet shows the nbi file is like 215 KB (versus the 1 kb of a new unconfigured nbi file)

Literally everything appears to be in the shadow copy folders.

I did try reinstalling 5.59 but Windows 10 UAC won't let me do it - even with UAC turned off.

This is absolute nightmare. Any ideas on what if anything I could do with the Shadow Copy Newsbin app data folder?

[dexter]

Grab that copy of your NBI and edit it with a text editor to make sure the data folder is correct. That error message you are getting means that your user account does not have read/write access to the data folder. There is a procedure for changing the data folder location at http://help.newsbin.com/index.php/V660- ... r_location

Whatever you do, don't run the uninstaller because that might remove your data folder and you'll really lose your 10 years worth of data.

If you recently upgraded to Windows 10 then the permissions problem might be a new thing. There have been other reports that an upgrade makes the old data folder location inaccessible by the user account. In that case, you either need to manually adjust the permissions on the old data folder, or move the data folder location as described in the link above.

Hope this helps.

[lance317]

I upgraded Newsbin but none of the groups or the 15 GB of folders from SPOOLv1 will show up. All of the db3 files are there, but Newsbin won't show Groups. Is this a registry thing? Just can't figure out why it won't read that groups.db3 file. thanks for any help, hate to lose all of this stuff.

[dexter]

You have to make sure the newsbin.nbi file is pointing to that data folder, then you have to add the groups to the Groups List. Once you do that, Newsbin will be able to read the header data for the groups from disk. To be clear, this has nothing to do with groups.db3, that's just the group list available on your servers. Your header data is in folders under the spool_v6 folder named after each group.

Are you still using 5.59? The header database format changed since 6.0 I think so the latest version will not read header data created by Version 5.x