Sunday, November 11, 2007

Recovering a corrupted Akregator feed list

Akregator has an annoying habit of losing your configured feeds when it shuts down abnormally (as in whenever it's "killed"). It's supposed to have a backup of the file, but it manages to truncate that file too.

However, I've found a second backup of the file, ~/.kde/share/apps/akregator/Archive/feedlistbackup.mk4 It contains some binary data at the top, and then appears to have a several different versions of the opml file.

To recover:

cd ~/.kde/share/apps/akregator/Archive/
cp feedlistbackup.mk4 ../data/protect_my_backup
[shut down akregator]
cp feedlistbackup.mk4 feeds.opml
vi feeds.opml
[remove the binary data at the top of the file, leaving the XML declaration tag and the <opml>...</opml> section. Remove everything from the first </opml> to the end of the file.]
[restart akregator]

Just remember, copy the file as soon as you see the problem, if you shut akgregator down, it will overwrite the backup file when it manages to exit properly.

If that "feedlistbackup.mk4" doesn't look right, you can always try to recover the opml file from the list of sites in the archive. However, it won't be organised into folders, and it will probably have all the feeds you have ever subscribed to.

5 comments:

Damian said...

Hello, Google Reader!

Jason Pollock said...

I'd switch, but I search through my archives too often.

Anonymous said...

Jason, Google Reader has a search box for "Searching all Items", ie. it searches _just_ your feeds. So if you've read something in one of your feeds but don't know where it is, you can just type a term in there and it will find it.

Jason Pollock said...

Oooh, off to google reader I go!

Jason Pollock said...

Just gave google reader a try.

On my laptop (2ghz p4m, 512m), it chugs. So, I think I'll stay with akregator. :)

It does look like a pretty cool tool though.

For light, remote reading, it works well. It does seem to have strange ideas about what feeds were unread though. Very odd.