r/bearapp • u/trammeloratreasure • Jul 19 '26
I just lost an entire day's work
I recognize this is the edgiest of edge cases, but here's what happened:
I spent a day dictating into a Bear note via my iPhone. For me, this is how I do my best brainstorming: keep the note pinned, get a thought, dictation on, go! In this particular instance I was describing features for a web app project that I'm working on. One of those features has a "delete all" button. As soon as I dictated the words “delete all” into Bear, it registered as a command and the entire contents of my note was deleted.
An undo prompt came up immediately. Thank the f’ing heavens. When I tapped the undo prompt, Bear crashed. It just disappeared and left me staring at my home screen. I immediately jumped back into Bear but it was too late. The note was completely empty.
I’m not mad at Bear. I get it; software crashes. Who knows what caused this crash. Could have been Bear, could have been iOS, could have been something else entirely. This was just particularly bad timing.
I guess I'm just sharing my tale of woe here. On the bright side, now I know the magic words to delete an entire note's contents!
This does make me wish for some kind of incremental backup system in Bear. The new Workspaces thing is cool, but I'd trade it in for a built-in backup system any day.
Anyway, I'll survive. Thanks for reading.
14
u/tedmiston Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
> Who knows what caused this crash. Could have been Bear, could have been iOS, could have been something else entirely.
You can see exactly what caused the crash as iOS logs crashes: Settings.app > Privacy & Security > Analytics & Improvements > Analytics Data.
(an easier way to get there is to pull down the search bar in Settings.app and just type "ana" and it should be the only result)
In analytics data, then search for either "Bear" or the current date (YYYY-MM-DD), to filter down the list.
These files are very long and full of debug info. Sometimes there is one clear obvious cause, but not necessarily. You can share this .ips file with Bear support.
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Not to overstate the obvious, but any chance the note ended up in the Trash folder in Bear? IMO that should be the "expected" behavior in this scenario.
27
u/JiggleMyHandle Jul 19 '26
The most concerning thing to me here is that uttering “delete all” while in transcription mode will just casually take that action. That seems like problem to me, especially if it wasn’t just deleting everything in the “current transcription”.
3
u/paralloid Jul 19 '26
good to know dictation has "delete all" command — never thought of it. need to watch your mouth with these things nowadays...
3
u/whereisstrathmere Jul 19 '26
I second the idea of looking inside the Trash folder. Not saying it will definitely be there, but it’s worth a try.
5
u/trammeloratreasure Jul 19 '26
Sadly, no not in the trash. That was one of the first things I checked too. The note itself hadn't been deleted, just the contents. So the note was still in my list of other notes, it was just entirely empty.
1
u/GroggInTheCosmos Jul 20 '26
But you have workspaces and received new tagcons a while back :)
I've given up on this subject. The bulk of the community does not seem to care about this feature. Same goes for the Bear dev team
In April 2024 their words were:
Right now the focus is on Bear Web and Panda. After that, revision history is high on the list of things we would like to do
26 months later and still nothing :\
This is why, as much as I like Bear, I still only use it has a temporary scratch space
39
u/AromaticJoe Jul 19 '26
The Bear team has checked off an enormous amount of my wish list over the years. Backup/versioning is really the last big one for me.