Guide | Lost or Corrupted Feed Mitigation

[deneban]

If you have lost or corrupted RSS Feed posts you wanted to save, but are too old for the Parent Blog to send them anymore, there may be a way to get them back!

Revision 5: Feb 3, 2024, 14:30Z

• Seeking Tranquility in the Face of Feed-deleting Remedies

Many of the remedies called for in this guide ask you to delete Feeds from Vivaldi while on a path to restoring your complete NewsFeed health. You may have trepidation doing this. What you can do to relieve this anxiety is check the "WayBack Machine" to see if your Feed is captured in the time periods you are concerned with (or perhaps even for the entire life of the Feed). Simply go to web.archive.org and type the address of the Feed in question into the textbox in the page header and press enter. Here is an example using http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default:

If you get a timeline as a result, and the capture dates displayed are about the time period(s) you want to keep, you can take a deep breath because you will be able to restore your Feed, Feed deletion notwithstanding...

You can use the first of two methods provided here to restore your Feed to be healthy and normal within Vivaldi.

• Uncaptured Feeds

If the WayBack Machine did not capture your Feed (i.e. you get no timeline or no timeline where you need it), you may not be able to restore the older posts in the Feed to the Vivaldi Feed itself. If restarted from scratch, most Feeds will only restore the most recent posts but the older ones may perish if you delete the Feed. If this is your case, use the second of two approaches given below which restores the posts outside of Vivaldi.

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First Method: "All-in-One"

Use this method if you have confirmed the WayBack Machine has captured your Feed on or near the Feed historic dates you want to keep. This method is capable of restoring the entire lifetime of the Feed into the same Feed listing which Vivaldi is now keeping current. What's better than that?.

• Backing up Vivaldi Data

And now a brief word from our sponsor.... On advice from our Moderator Community, please make a backup of your Vivaldi profile folder before executing this method. Note that Feed data is not sync'd. Personally, I include my Vivaldi profile in my weekly PC image backup.

• Database Error Detected

First, if your Feed panel or Feed settings dialog says "Database Error Detected", you must first clear that error before proceeding with this approach, or else it will interfere with the re-addition of the historic posts you seek. Even the addition of today's new posts fresh from the site is an unreliable affair at best while this condition persists. My experience is that the Database error is cleared when you delete one or two offending Feed entries in the Feed Settings dialog. It is likely that the Feed for which you are seeking history on is the same Feed messing up the database, so it's a good bet that deleting that one will clear the database condition.

In some circumstances, Vivaldi may indicate which Feed is causing the problem in the Feed Settings interface feed list if the user scrolls through item-by-item. There is at least one report in this topic which cites a retrieval error rather than an actual database error causing "Database Error Detected" to appear. Check if all your feed URLs remain accurate.

In the absence of such an indicator, usually the user or their conscience knows which Feed(s) caused the database error. Another approach is to delete the Feeds in the reverse order they were created. Again, you don’t need to worry about Feed deletion if the WayBack Machine has got you covered.

• Restore Feeds

Once the database error(s) is/are cleared, you can try reinstating the deleted Feed and then use the "Restore Feeds" button and see if everything falls into place correctly and you get your historic posts back. There have been reports with older Vivaldi versions that a number of restarts is needed to see this through - not sure if this is the case with the current 6.5, but there is, in any event, a lag for the full restoration to be realized, so please allow it ample time to show results.

If you do not have the Database problem annunciated on your Feed panel/Feed settings dialog, try the "Restore Feeds" button in the Feed Settings dialog. If a Feed in Vivaldi is corrupted such that the "Restore Feeds" is not successful in restoring all the older historic posts you want, you will need to delete that Feed and then recreate it (if you haven't already done so for the aforementioned Database error(s)) as a new Feed entry. Upon re-creation, it is highly likely the source site may only send you the most recent posts, and anything else older than that which you wanted to keep is no longer accessible.

• What follows is a technique to recover those older posts and have them once again reside within the same Feed as the current Feed.

• There is also a secondary method given below the primary which recovers the posts contents and links outside of Vivaldi.

With this approach you can restore any or all Feed captures that the WayBack Machine has to your current active Feed, fully restoring its health.

The first step is to delete the Feed, and then recreate it with the known address. Proceed after the Feed has gathered its most recent posts into Vivaldi.

Go to web.archive.org, also known as the "WayBack Machine" (named after a frequented fictitious time machine in the 1959 American cartoon series "Rocky and Bullwinkle"):

Fortunately this website crawls over and saves many other websites periodically.

Incidentally, here is the original WABAC machine:

Go to your Feed list in Vivaldi and copy to the clipboard the URL of the feed in question:

In this case the URL is http://lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default. Note the Feed is a couple of layers below the blog domain in this case, which will show the resiliency of this method.

Paste the URL in the WayBack Machines' textbox:

.

Hit enter and wait for the timeline to appear.

Here we see the blog's URL was captured 25 times between Jul 27, 2011 and Nov 28, 2023:

Let's say we want to get the earliest posts to his blog. First, click on the year 2011, and a 2011 calendar will then appear below the timeline. In that calendar, the captured dates will be highlighted. In this case the earliest capture is Jul 27, 2011:

.

Hovering over the 27th, we then click on the time of the capture:

In few seconds, the XML feed data will appear in the Vivaldi tab:

A helpful navigation bar is also presented at the top to navigate to the other captures.

Then it is a matter of simply pasting the URL in the white navigation bar into a new Vivaldi Feed address field. It is actually a sort of "dual URL": https://web.archive.org/web/20111007151134/http:/lowlightmixes.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default.

Going back to the Feed settings, change the Feed address to be that "dual URL":

Then click on the "Save" and "Update all Feeds" buttons.

If everything is healthy these old posts will appear as a result. Here are the posts that came into Vivaldi for this example:

Now, click on the blue back or blue forward arrow in the WayBack Machines page header and wait for the XML data to update. :

Then copy the new overall page address in the Vivaldi tab to your clipboard, similarly another "dual URL"

...and paste it to a separate new URL list outside of Vivaldi:

Continue to click one-at-a-time on the WayBack Machines arrows and copy and paste the resulting URLs to the external list:

Do this until you have recorded all the URLS for the WayBack Machines' capture dates you want to see in your final Feed.

Once you have all these URLs recorded in a Vivaldi-external list, go back to the Feed Setting dialog box and paste in the address field of your Feed the first URL you recorded on the external list:

You must completely erase the contents of this field before you paste. Once pasted in, click on the "Save" button and then the "Update all Fields" button.

In a few seconds, you should get a notifier telling you new posts have been received. If you now look at your mail panel, this Feed will now have the first and second timeline posts you added in conjunction with the modern current posts. Happy Day! Congratulations!

Repeat this process for every URL on the external list: paste over the URL in the address field with the next URL, Save, Update, and wait for the incoming posts. Don't get ahead of the post deliveries.

Once you have completed this for all the URLs on the external list, be sure to reinstate the normal feed address in the address field of the Feed and Save:

Voilà! Your Feed now has the historic posts you needed, is healthy, and updates itself to be current, all-in-one.

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An Alternative Method for Recovering the Content of Old Lost/Corrupted Feed Posts

If :
• the WayBack Machine does not capture your Feed, or
• you don't want to deal with de-corrupting the Feed database or
• you don't care about whether the older posts you seek appear in the Vivaldi Feed displays,

...you can try reading the old post files directly from your operating system's folder listings. This method will give you the post texts and their embedded hyperlinks, but you will have to copy and paste them somewhere else outside of Vivaldi to record them. In this example, I will show how it is done in Windows.

Even though Vivaldi cannot find these older posts and list them out for you in the intended format, the good news is the posts are still there in your profile in a readable fashion.

Click on the "Reveal Data Folder" in the Vivaldi Feed Settings dialog:

A new tab will appear in your browser that will list the contents of the folder containing all your Feed messages. It does exclude all mail despite the parent folder's namesake. The Feed "data" folder revealed will be the same no matter which Feed is selected in dialog:

Vivaldi stores the feed content in a very organized fashion: top tier is year, next layer down month, and the second layer down date. It is important to recognize these are "data" folders only and not the "database" itself. Now open this folder in your operating system's folder listing:

You can now navigate to any date for which there was Feed text and see what that that text was, and even what links it contained. Once you get down to the post level, the post files are saved in ".eml" (email) file format:

These .eml files should be readable by an external email program, such as Outlook. Opening the .eml file and observe the post you lost:

Note that the email header will always be completely blank, so you are relying on the contained folder hierarchy to date the post. You will have to decide which Feed the post belongs to by reading it. Simple enough.

Warning - do not make the mistake of re-organizing this .eml file and folder structure believing if will fix the damaged database. These files only tell Vivaldi what a post says once the database has pointed to it. Since you can't fix the database, you cannot fix the damaged Feed listings. Manipulating this file and folder structure will result in your database pointing to data it cannot find and results in what were good posts now appearing blank. Be content you have resurfaced the date and content and leave it at that.

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ModEdit: Title | Added to Guide | list
Author Edit Jan 31, 2024 4:00Z: Added database error paragraphs.
Author Appended with alternate method and added editorial note Feb 1, 2024 5:30Z
Author Rewrite Feb 3 0:55Z
Author appended Database Error section Feb 4, 2024 13:30Z
Rev 5: Author added Backup Data section per Moderator request Feb 4, 2024 14:30Z

[Zalex108]

Hi,
Regarding Deletions, you could point to the
Official Back Up options before and then continue with the Guide.

[deneban]

@Zalex108 Hi Zalex, can you be more specific? Since Feeds are not sync'd do you mean make a copy of the entire profile folder?

[Zalex108]

@deneban said in Guide | Lost or Corrupted Feed Mitigation:

@Zalex108 Hi Zalex, can you be more specific? Since Feeds are not sync'd do you mean make a copy of the entire profile folder?

Yep,
Is the most easier for newbies.

Despite they're in Preferences and Mail/8xxxx folder.

It's the easiest way to avoid Data loss and User's complains.

[deneban]

@Zalex108 Ok done