Some questions I’ve been meaning to ask as a fairly basic user:
Workspaces are basically just differently filtered views of the same drafts/content, correct? In other words, there’s no built in way to create different sets of drafts with different contents, ie the equivalent of different documents or folders. Or do I have this wrong?
I could have sworn I saw somewhere on the interface a way to “reset” drafts. Does this mean delete all existing drafts and clean the slate? Can’t seem to locate it but am almost certain I saw it.
These questions arise because at some point my iphone drafts and my mac drafts diverged/stopped synching and I am in the process of restoring my Mac after Apple kindly wiped it.
Luckily Drafts seems to have kept backups of both iphone and mac versions and I want to retrieve both. The iphone version isn’t a problem as it took all my notes while my Mac was in the shop etc and is the version currently on the cloud.
My quandry is how to retrieve the old mac version without overwriting what is now on my iphone and in the cloud. I’m thinking these steps:
a) Wipe the version currently on iphone and cloud. (As above, I have this exported in CSV and can move notes to the normal next phase of my workflow.)
b) Go off line. (Lately Apple seems to sometimes synch my system whether or not I have synch enabled.. )
c) Import the back up I have of the Mac version.
d) Export that version to CSV and move notes as above in step 1.
I have a ton of drafts/notes and am ok starting over from scratch…
Yes, basically. More explanation in the docs, but think of workspaces as sort of macros that apply a set of filters and display settings to the draft list.
I try not to put the “reset” instructions in the public docs because it’s the kind of thing people stumble on trying to do their own troublshooting and then suddenly realize they wiped all the data permanently and didn’t mean to. I can send them via DM if you really want them.
The rest…
So, I think you are saying for some period of time you were using Drafts on the Mac without it syncing and you want to recover that content.
Am I correct that now that you wiped and re-setup the Mac, it is syncing and has all your iPhone data?
If you have a Drafts automatic backup (.draftsExport) from the Mac (internal JSON format, not CSV), it will be a full dump of all your drafts from that device. If you open that backup file in Drafts, you will be prompted about how you want to handle the import. Details in the user guide backup article.
If there are drafts in that backup with UUIDs that match exist drafts, you have a bit of a quandary. You can choose to update those existing drafts with the version in the backup, or import all the drafts in the backup as new. If you may have made changes on the iPhone to some in the meantime that you don’t want to lose, you can import them as new drafts – and I would recommend also having the import assign a tag (like “restored”) to these so you can filter by them if needed.
You might also want to try importing the Mac backup as new drafts with a unique tag first, so you can compare them side-by-side with your current synced drafts before deciding what to keep or merge. Keeps things safer and easier to sort.