Recovering your kjots books

For those who don't know about kjots, it is a note taking utility that comes with the KDE desktop environment. It allows you to organize your notes into Books. Each book will have pages where you can actually save your notes. It has formating options like font selection,color,alignment etc. It allows you to export your books and/or pages to text/html formats. There are many other handy function like bookmarking searching etc.. It is a very handy and lightweight application.

I was using this for quite some time and had two books full of notes. One fine morning my KDE crashed leaving my system in hung state. When it came up after the reboot, I found that all the notes in Kjots were gone leaving two blank books in it. So I was sitting there scratching my head, suddenly it came to my mind that Kjots has an automatic backup facility and decided to try my luck.

All kde applications store their per user configuration and user data inside the local kde directory under the respective user's home directory. In most of the cases it will be .kde directory under the users home directory. But in KDE4 this wil change to .kde4. So to determine the kde directory for your user account you need to run the following command.

safeer@cms-netbook:~$ kde-config --localprefix
/home/safeer/.kde/

The kjots data is located in the path share/apps/kjots under ~/.kde. Lets examine the contents of this directory:

safeer@cms-netbook:~/.kde/share/apps/kjots$ ls
Oj6443.book Oj6443.book.2 Oj6443.book.4 Oj6443.book.6~ xA4048.book xA4048.book.10~ xA4048.book.3~ xA4048.book.6~ xA4048.book.8~
Oj6443.book.1 Oj6443.book.2~ Oj6443.book.4~ Oj6443.book.7~ xA4048.book.1 xA4048.book.2 xA4048.book.4~ xA4048.book.7 xA4048.book.9
Oj6443.book.1~ Oj6443.book.3 Oj6443.book.5 Oj6443.book.8~ xA4048.book.1~ xA4048.book.2~ xA4048.book.5~ xA4048.book.7~ xA4048.book.9~
Oj6443.book.10~ Oj6443.book.3~ Oj6443.book.5~ Oj6443.book.9~ xA4048.book.10 xA4048.book.3 xA4048.book.6 xA4048.book.8

Kjots by default assigns a random filename to each of your kjots books. This will not be the same as the name you have assigned to the book. Kjots stores its books in xml format. If you want to know which file corresponds to which book, use this command. Here the name I gave to this kjots book is "TrainingNotes".

safeer@cms-netbook:~/.kde/share/apps/kjots$ grep -A 1 -m 1 KJotsBook Oj6443.book.6~|grep Title|cut -d '>' -f2|cut -d '<' -f1
TrainingNotes

Kjots takes backup of your books every time you close it. In addition to the original book, kjots will keep 10 most recent backups of each book. The backup and book naming scheme is as follows.

Book name convention: .book
Eg: Oj6443.book

Backup book name: .book.~ with .book.1~ being the most recent book.
Eg: Oj6443.book.3~
Most recent backup for the above book will have name Oj6443.book.1~

Now that you know about the kjots backup scheme, let us see how I recovered my kjots. First find out the good backup of each books.

safeer@cms-netbook:~/.kde/share/apps/kjots$ ls -l
total 576
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-10 16:14 Oj6443.book
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-24 18:39 Oj6443.book.1~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 19774 2009-09-10 16:52 Oj6443.book.10~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-19 16:37 Oj6443.book.2~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-18 18:16 Oj6443.book.3~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 48278 2009-09-17 21:45 Oj6443.book.4~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 48278 2009-09-17 21:21 Oj6443.book.5~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 48278 2009-09-17 21:21 Oj6443.book.6~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 48278 2009-09-16 17:15 Oj6443.book.7~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 48278 2009-09-16 17:02 Oj6443.book.8~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 19774 2009-09-16 16:59 Oj6443.book.9~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-24 18:39 xA4048.book
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-24 18:39 xA4048.book.1~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 39850 2009-09-10 16:52 xA4048.book.10~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-19 16:37 xA4048.book.2~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 0 2009-09-18 18:16 xA4048.book.3~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 42450 2009-09-17 21:45 xA4048.book.4~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 42450 2009-09-17 21:21 xA4048.book.5~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 42450 2009-09-17 21:21 xA4048.book.6~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 42450 2009-09-16 17:15 xA4048.book.7~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 39850 2009-09-16 17:02 xA4048.book.8~
-rw------- 1 safeer safeer 39850 2009-09-16 16:59 xA4048.book.9~

As you can see, the most recent good copy for both the books were backed up on 2009-09-17 21:45 (this should be the time when I closed the Kjots on the previous day). All files after this has zero size. So copying this backup files to the corresponding books will get my books back. Make sure to close Kjots before doing this.

safeer@cms-netbook:~/.kde/share/apps/kjots$ cp Oj6443.book.4~ Oj6443.book
safeer@cms-netbook:~/.kde/share/apps/kjots$ cp xA4048.book.4~ xA4048.book

Relaunched Kjots and my books were back with all the contents!