In an attempt to merge folders, I tried giving them the same name. This confused NewsBlur apparently, and it started only acting on one of the two folders, as if it couldn’t tell them apart. I then tried moving one folder to another location in the folder structure, but only one folder of the two remained afterwards. I looked through the downloaded OPML afterwards, and the feeds in the missing folder do seem to be gone. (I didn’t download it beforehand, unfortunately.)
It’s pretty bad for an RSS site to drop content without being explicitly deleted, is it possible for my missing feeds to be restored?
Absolutely, I can restore folders. However, I did just add a feature that emails you your OPML file when you delete a folder. But when you name two folders the same thing, they overwrite each other. I should probably add in a failsafe for this case. What’s your username?
Yeah, I saw that feature mentioned, sounds good. But I guess since this is more of a lost-folder issue, it didn’t quite kick in that function? My username is ‘doktorJung’, thanks!
Thanks for the help recovering my feeds! Hope the feedback about the bug is useful as well. Importing the backup resulted in duplicate folders, so I cleared out all my feeds and re-imported. I had a 2-level deep folder structure, and it didn’t duplicate the upper-level folders, so perhaps the import on merge only works on the top level? Looks like it remembered which entries were read though, so that’s nice. I’ll see if I have to re-train the existing feeds, but that should be manageable.
Had a subfolder named News/Science and a root folder named Science blogs. When I renamed the latter to Science, the subfolder News/Science disappeared, and its contents now show in the root folder named Science. The original feeds from Science blogs are gone.
It just happened, so I don’t know if an OPML backup is coming, but I have one from a few days ago and will try to import back this specific folder. Although I assume that the training data for these feeds may not be recoverable.
In any case, I was not aware that renaming folders could be dangerous. Can you confirm that folder names need to be unique even when nested? Or is it a bug?
Some updates. After posting the message above, I renamed the Science folder at the root to the subfolder News/Science news and left home. Now that I’m back at the computer and refreshed NewsBlur, all the feeds from the original Science blogs folder reappeared, now at the root. They weren’t gone in the end. Cheers!