Document bookmarks are gone today

This weekend I updated from iOS the previous version to 9.3.1 and today I went to one of my regular documents (under Recent Documents) and all of the bookmarks are gone (I'm pretty sure they were there on Friday).

1) I realize this is probably related to the lost support for DropBox, but since the files are still there (both the document and the "xxx.txt.plecobookmark" file) is there any way to get those bookmarks to work again by moving them somewhere else?

2) I AM able to create new bookmarks but can't locate that folder. Where is it?

That other 'plecobookmark' file most likely contains a new, empty set of bookmarks. If you look around in your Dropbox folder in detail, are there any extra / "conflict" versions of that .plecobookmarks file?

1) I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the "other" 'plecobookmark' file. Do you mean a "new" file?

I looked everywhere for other 'plecobookmark' files, in Dropbox through Pleco's File Manager, through Dropbox on my Dropbox phone app and through Dropbox on my computer. There are not any "conflict" files. I found some "old" files in ".dropbox.cache" and tried them, but it doesn't change anything. I went to my computer backup from last week and found the file (last modified two years ago probably when I created all the chapter locations in the document) and copied it over the "xxx.txt.plecobookmark" file in DropBox, but again, no change.

2) The new bookmarks that I've created since Monday are all still there. Are they stored in Dropbox or somewhere else? Is there a way to take my old "xxx.txt.plecobookmark" files and move them to the new location wherever that is? I opened a few other documents and all of the bookmarks are missing from those also. When I opened those docuements, the "xxx.txt.plecobookmark" file on my computer changes from the old "Date modified" to today so something is happening with those files.

Thanks for your help.

Sorry, by "other" I was referring to the .plecobookmark file that you saw there now.

Pleco's document reader doesn't reload bookmark files when you resume reading a document that was already open - we assume you'd rather save + keep whatever you're using right now - so moving the other files in would only work if you killed + reopened Pleco between changes. Try copying the .txt file along with a candidate .plecobookmark file into local storage (not Dropbox), then opening it there - does that work any better?

If you don't have any success with any of your other .plecobookmark files then I don't know really know any way to get them back unless you can find a backup somewhere (maybe Dropbox will still let you retrieve an old version of the file?) - we don't keep extra copies of bookmarks lying around, just the one in your .plecobookmark file.

As far as why this happened, Dropbox officially deprecated the old Sync API we use to access their service last week - that doesn't mean it's immediately stopped working (as it's built on top of a still-functional lower-level Dropbox API), but they're no longer officially supporting it and are encouraging everyone to move over to some other Dropbox access method ASAP, which in our case will be the standard iOS file picker ("External Files"). So this may be a consequence of that move on their end.

1) Ok. I tried "copying the .txt file along with a candidate .plecobookmark file into local storage (not Dropbox)" after I had deleted the existing files. The bookmark file is now empty. I first tried it by "Open Document>External Files" method, but I couldn't "copy" the files, only "open" the "test" file. I then used the old method through "File Manager>Dropbox Folder" and copied both of the "old" files in.

2) Are the bookmarks still stored in Dropbox or somewhere else?

If you were accessing them through our old Dropbox support, that would be giving you a synced version of whatever's on Dropbox, so if those bookmarks are now empty then the ones on Dropbox most likely are too. They wouldn't be stored anywhere else on Dropbox aside from that .plecobookmark file.

(FWIW, we're killing the entire .plecobookmark concept in our next major update - storing everything centrally)

Wow. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this still doesn't make sense. Tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

I have these two files from my computer backup last week.
xxx.txt (last changed 2014-03-31)
xxx.txt.plecobookmark (last changed 2014-05-02)

I deleted those same files in Pleco "local".

I "kill" Pleco and open it again.

From inside Pleco>File Manager>Dropbox Folder, I copy those same named files and move them to Pleco "local".

I open "xxx.txt" and the bookmarks are gone.

Am I the only one who has lost bookmarks?

It sounds like your bookmarks on Dropbox were deleted / overwritten somehow, that's pretty much been my theory from the beginning. Pleco never overwrites an existing .plecobookmark file, but it does create a new one if there isn't one already there, so I'm guessing that that one is an empty / newly created one after your old file went missing somehow. (if you email or PM me the file I can confirm that that's the case)

We've had a few reports of people losing their last position in large EPUB files that had their loading canceled, but that issue was specific to the way we load EPUBs - I don't know of any reports of bookmark losses from plaintext files.

Ok. I'll PM you.

Thanks for your help. I learned I should move the files to "local" on Pleco and not read from them on Dropbox.

One more general question related to "copying" files from Dropbox (not opening files from Dropbox). In the future when the File Manager>Dropbox Folder seems like it won't work (from what I understand will happen eventually), what is the best way to "copy" a file over from Dropbox to Pleco?

It should be possible via "External Files" - right now you'll see the file end up in an 'imported documents' folder in local storage, though we're working to make that more seamless.

I tried that and the "xxx.txt" file will open and indeed is in "Imported Documents", but while I can "see" the "xxx.txt.plecobookmark" file in Dropbox, it is "grayed out" and I can click on it. Therefore, if I want to move some bookmarks from my computer through Dropbox, it doesn't appear that method will work.

I DID use the "File Manager>Upload/Download Files" and my web browser and that worked.

Yeah, this is part of why we're moving to that centralized store - Apple's file picker won't give us access to a file unless you tap on it, won't even let us know the file exists, so that attached .plecobookmark file doesn't work so well. Our suggested migration for legacy Dropbox users who still have documents they're reading within Dropbox will most likely be to package everything up in a .zip archive and upload that to Pleco. (in fairness, we have been putting up alerts about Dropbox support getting discontinued for a long time now...)

Clarification: you won't lose your .plecobookmark files on this migration, plan is that we'll basically check to see if a file has some centralized bookmarks on open, load those if it does, and look for + import them from a .plecobookmark file if it doesn't.

Thanks for your response Mike.

I don't remember the Dropbox alerts until recently, but my memory isn't so good anymore. Yet, even when I got those I kind of thought "What does that have to do with me? I just move my files FROM Dropbox TO Pleco so it's not an issue." Little did I know that the file I look at almost daily (and the related bookmark file) was actually still in Dropbox and not local to Pleco.

Yeah, one of the many reasons we're not trying to migrate to the new Dropbox API is that we want people to always know where their files live