Help! After spending a week on organizing over 6000 fonts, I powered down my computer and restarted it and now everything in Fontbase is out of whack. Some of my fonts stayed organized, but only a handful of them. Now my collections are not in the order I so carefully had to number so they were in the order I wanted and not alphabetical. And now some of the collection names are not even names I had given them. What is this all about? Is there anything we can do to restore this? And is there anything that can be done to guarantee this will not happen again? The root folder stayed the same and all of my fonts are showing up in Fontbase, just not in the collections I had organized them in. Thank you in advance for any help!
Hello @hkdesign, thank you for the post and welcome to the forum 
Thank you for the detailed description.
Just to double-check - are you referring to “Collections” (in the app’s sidebar on the left), i.e. the higher section, or “Folders”, the lower section?
Trying to figure out what the cause might be,
Thank you again,
Yuriy
FontBase Dev Team
Thank you for getting back to me! I am at a stand still right now, trying to determine if I should start reorganizing my fonts for a third time (my collections got wiped out a few years back and I had to start over again). Or if I need to find a different program to house my fonts in. I appreciate your response and hope we can get to the root of the problem because I do enjoy the features of Fontbase, I just can’t have this happen again! Thank you again for your time.
Thank you for the quick reply
Do you perchance have a screenshot of how the collection names looked before and after? Or remember a specific example of a collection name before and after this happened?
Also, before this event, your collections were not in alphabetical order?
Do you have the “auto-sync collections” feature enabled?
If yes, is your app root folder located on a network/Google drive, where other people’s FontBase instances could be using the same collection sync file?
Thank you again,
Yuriy
Hi Yuriy,
Thank you for your response. My collections were in alphabetical order (I did not want them to be so I used numbers to group them together).
I attached a current screenshot of how my collections are supposed to look (I have started organizing them again, and this is how they were named before everything was out of whack).
Auto-sync is enabled. My root folder is on my desktop and I am the only one accessing it.
I was wondering how the collections were exported so I can save them in folders in case this happens again. I can see you can right click and package each individual collection. Is there a way to do that to the entire collection so I do not have to do that for 40+ individual collections? When I attempted to do in from the settings page, under the Advanced section, it saved it as an Adobe After Effects file and I do not know how to access that file type.
Let me know if there are any other questions.
Thank you again!
Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.
The Adobe After Effects is probably just selected as the default system application to open/handle .JSON file type, which is the file type FontBase uses to store exported collection data. Clicking export, as you’ve already tried, will save collection data in a separate .JSON file, which you can store wherever you’d like. To use it, use the “Import collections” button in the Settings page. Please note it only stores the collections themselves (its name and names of fonts in it), not the actual font files that were added to that collection. Does this make sense?
Thank you for sharing the screenshot of how things are now, it is very helpful. Do you perhaps have a screenshot or can just give an example of a collection or two right after everything went out of whack? I do understand how things look now, but in order to understand what happened it would be really useful to see how did things look right after the change, to determine what changed exactly and then what that change could’ve been caused by.
For example you have “1_sans_type” and “4_block_type”. What was their “out of whack” version?
Thank you again,
Thank you for your response. If you look at the first screenshot I sent, under the numbered collection names, there are some of the collections names that were out of whack. For example: bold, casual_script, childrens, classic_script, etc. They should have been numbered with fonts in the collection, like in the latest screenshot I sent.
Hello again. I wanted to get some clarification on saving the .JSON file. When you said, “Please note it only stores the collections themselves (its name and names of fonts in it), not the actual font files that were added to that collection.”
If I would have done that before things went wrong, would that have allowed me to import the organized collections and they would have been able to be restored? Because my fonts were not effected and all of them were still in FontBase.
I guess I am asking for the best preventive measure to ensure my countless hours of organization do not get messed up again.
Thank you!
Hi, sorry for the delay and thank you for the clarification.
Yes, about the .JSON file, this is exactly what it is intended for, as well as possibly sharing your collections with other users etc.
Having to re-do something you’ve spent hours on is no fun, I know what you mean too well.
Still working on understanding what happened to the collection names in your case. The main suspects were collection auto-sync and other people using the same FontBase installation or app data, but as you’ve said, it can’t be it, so digging deeper.
Thank you again
Thank you for your time and help figuring this out. And thank you for clarifying the .JSON file, that is exactly what I needed. I hope you can get to the bottom of what happened and thanks again for your assistance. Great customer service!
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