Lost my work in Nand2Tetris Online IDE

[treyp728]

Hi, I'm using the Online IDE to do my coding. I'm currently midway through Project 3. A browser update (I'm using Google Chrome) automatically occurred, and now my code is missing. Has this happened to anyone else? Any ideas for how I could potentially get my work back? Do a lot of you all use the desktop version to prevent things like this from happening? Thank you to anyone who can help me out

[WBahn]

I've seen one other post where that happened and I'm pretty sure that, or something similar, happened to me. I definitely don't like these apps that store all of your data in your browser, since even if things don't go wrong like this, it locks you to that browser on that computer, when supposedly the whole point of web-based tools is to increase your flexibility to work from multiple places.

I don't have a solution for you. I would imagine that the data is probably somewhere in the files associated with your browser, but I have no idea how to find which ones or extract the information from them.

Note that you can download your files from the browser to your hard drive. Supposedly you can then upload them to another computer/browser, however I've never figured out how to do that yet. The documentation on the new tool suite is very lacking, but that will change with time. They are constantly making improvements and addressing issues, so I have quite a bit of hope that they will eventually become a very nice tool set.

[treyp728]

Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply! I will do a better job of downloading my .hdl files on a regular basis going forward. I reached out to Google because I am using the Chrome browser and asked for their help too. I'll let you know if they have a solution. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. -Trey

[yarpen26]

Yup, same thing happened to me when I was grappling with the ALU  at the end of Project 2. Just when I wanted to look up some of the earlier implementations of course.

By the way, that app sucks. I know, it's all for free, no grounds to complain. But still, it seems to have been deliberately designed to make your work as needlessly hard as possible. No copying to the clipboard? The fact that they bothered to write how you can't edit the answer pane in read-only instead of just disabling the ability to click there altogether (which would prevent the keyboard from popping up and messing up your view if you're on your phone)? List goes on.

[WBahn]

The new tools certainly have some growing pains, though many of the issues are steadily being overcome as new features are implemented. Also, I suspect that the creators of the apps are discovering that what they thought was useful and important is not a perfect match for what many users of the desktop apps found useful and important. They seem to be focused on clearing up bugs that actually affect the correctness of the tools, which is where the focus should be, and addressing usability issues second.

It's going to take some time, but I think that the online tools will end up being pretty nice in the end. In the meantime, I'm largely sticking with the desktop tools.