Do you believe that you have lost edits to a document? This document provides a method created in order to provide instructions from retrieving a lost file from the Privia cache.
Overview
Figure 1. Select “Folder Options” in the Control Panel |
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When documents are opened for editing using the Privia Pure Web version of the client, the browser will ask users to open, save, or cancel the action. Privia cannot prevent this dialog and the user should always choose to save the document, edit the document, and upload the document by unlocking. However, when users click “Open”, the browser will save the document to the browser cache while the document is being edited. When the editor for the document closes, the user does not know where the document was stored in the browser cache, and can lose the document. This document provides a method created in order to provide instructions from retrieving a lost file from the Privia cache.
What is Using Pure Web?
When accessing Privia through a browser without the Windows client installed (Pure Web), there is no means for the Privia application to manage the location where the documents are stored. Every browser stores temporary documents in a different location. In Pure Web, the user has to explicitly save the file to the local machine to edit, and then once finished with editing, upload the file back into Privia. Regarding recover a file that was opened through Pure Web, if the user has not exited the browser yet, the file should still be in the Internet Explorer cache location. If the user has exited from the browser, the documents will probably be lost, as most browsers clear the cache on the exit action.
Recovering Lost Files in Internet Explorer
1. Open the Control Panel on the local machine.
2. Select “Folder Options” or “File Explorer Options (Win 10)” in the Control Panel screen as shown in the above image.
3. Select the “View” tab along the top of the dialog.
4. Scroll down to the “Hidden files and folders” section
5. Select the radio button beside “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”
Figure 2. Show Hidden Files and Folders |
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4. Open the Windows Start menu; in the search field along the bottom, enter the following information (Windows doesn’t show the folder unless the following path is entered):
Windows 7 and 8: “%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5” (be sure to not enter quotes).
Windows 10: %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\IE\ (be sure to not enter quotes).
5. This folder will contain many sub-folders that have strange names; the file that is being sought out will be located in one of these folders. Enter Alt+V on the keyboard to choose the view menu, and then choose “Sort by”
6. If the user did not exit Internet Explorer, then the files(s) should be found in the cache of the browser.
Recovering Lost Files in Firefox
1. Open the Control Panel on the local machine.
2. Select “Folder Options” in the Control Panel screen
3. Select the “View” tab along the top of the dialog.
4. Open the Windows Start menu; in the search field along the bottom, enter the following information (Windows doesn’t show the folder unless the following path is entered): “%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp” (be sure to not enter quotes).
5. This folder will contain many sub-folders that have strange names; the file that is being sought out will be located in one of these folders. Enter Alt+V on the keyboard to choose the view menu, and then choose “Sort by”
Recovering Lost Files from a “Save As” Action
When editing, if the user chooses “save as” from the application (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) during the editing process, the file application will continue to make all updates to the new location and stop updating the Privia cache. The result of this will be that checking the document in with the installed client will upload the last version saved to the Privia cache, but not the changes made to the “Save As” location. In this case, the user can go to the document history section in the respective Microsoft Office application in order to find where on the local machine the document was saved.
Lazy Writes and “Publish to Privia”
If a user happens to press the “Publish to Privia” button add-in within an Office application, the publish action may happen before the Microsoft application has updated the document in the Privia cache. Microsoft implemented a feature that allows a user to continue editing a document while the application continues saving the document. This feature is intended to allow large documents to be saved to an internet share, such as Dropbox, and allow the user to continue working on the document while it is being saved in the background.
Privia versions 5.8 or earlier, expected the save action to have completed quickly enough, so that the upload process would save the latest version. However, in some conditions, the “Publish to Privia” add-in will get to the cache before the Office application has had time to write the changes that were made on the document. The result of this is that the original version is uploaded to the server.
In this case, if the user has not tried to open the file from within Privia again, the user can go to the Privia cache and retrieve the edited file. If the user has opened the file from Privia, the cache will have already been overwritten and the changes will have been lost. If the user has not opened the file from within Privia, then open the respective Office application and go to the history of documents section and open the most recent document with the same name.
The Privia cache is located in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Privia\Profile#. The “AppData” folder is hidden by default, so, either set the system to not hide the folder, or navigate to the folder directly.
Note that in Privia version 5.9 or later, the “Publish to Privia” add-in disables background saves, to force the Office application to complete saving the document before the add-in uploads the file. This action slows the perceived time in order to save a document, but solves the issue of delayed writes in Office applications.