This is a call for help from the Knack community to see if anyone has experienced a similar issue. We are using the Pro version so have 10GB of storage which we have always been well under having 7 apps of a few hundred MB each with 4 of these actually being backup copies.
Suddenly 6 days ago we received a “friendly notice” that we had exceeded our 10GB with one of the Backup copies suddenly increasing in size to 48GB. This seemed very strange so I immediately logged a support request and initiated the Delete Unused Assets to see if that helped resolve the issue. Support was received and nothing untoward was found but the Delete process had failed. I said it was OK to stop it and we could delete the Backup copy of the database so it could be copied again.
We then found that 20-30% of our images were missing in a 12000 player registration system. These are mission critical to us as it is the whole purpose of the system to have records of all our players.
The feed back we have received now is that the images in the original app got attached to the backup app from earlier so when it tried to remove unused assets it ended up deleting assets that the original app was linked to as it seems both of these apps were “Sharing” the same asset instead of copying it when the copy was made.
The Knack team looked into this deeper and found that when the system copied this app earlier this year it did create a log in our system when it started. However, it never logged that it finished. This means that it left the assets in a broken state where the copied app was pointing to the old app.
So the assets would load fine but any changes to the assets in the new copy would have been reflected in the original app as well.
So when we tried to clear the unused assets it started to delete some of the assets from the original app. The good news is that it got stuck and failed. (Possibly because of this issue) so it did not continue to delete any more assets from the original app.
Sadly because these assets were deleted by the “Remove Unused assets” we are not able to restore these files from a backup as this action makes these assets unrecoverable as stated in our help article: Managing Your Apps and under the “App Storage: Delete Unused Assets” section.
We have been using this database for nearly 10 years and we seem to have been treated very flippantly when it comes to support of this issue. For us as a customer this is totally unacceptable as we have to accept massive loss of data and complete loss of functionality as a result of several flawed processes the original copy, the incorrect sizing , the delete unused assets and the database deletion.