App Designer - recover an overwritten app

While working on two of my apps last night, I accidentally overwrote one of them with another. I didn't notice it until this morning when I opened both apps and the same app opened. Whatsmore, the app that was overwritten took at least 5 days of work, while the app that remained took like 2 hours. Is there a way to restore an overwritten app?

[Mario Malic]

I don't think that it is possible to recover. Use Projects with Source Control Integration, it'll help.

[Adam Danz]

I don't understand this part " I didn't notice it until this morning when I opened both apps and the same app opened." Do they have different file names but when you open both of them, they appear to be the same app? If so, how did that happen? Did you save-as and then rename the app to a name that matches a pre-existing app? If so, didn't you get an overwrite warning?

Perhaps your machine has a recover service and I'd make a copy of the app and don't touch the original until you're sure you can't retreive it. I don't know of any service Mathworks has to retrieve the older version if it's overwritten but you could always contact tech support in case they know of some backdoor mechanisms.

[Aleksandar Ritan]

That's probably what happened. The name of one app is robot_params.mlapp and the other one is robot_config_params.mlapp. I was working late and must have saved one over the other by accident because of similar names. I downloaded several demo/trial versions of the best recovery software available, but none of them detected the overwritten file. I have set up Git now and started working on the app again.

[Adam Danz]

Sorry you experienced this. I often store current projects in a dropbox folder which offers version control and then when I'm done with the project I set the files to read-only and move them outside of dropbox to free up the space. Git is another great option but does not have the automatic & frequent backup option the dropbox has.

[Aleksandar Ritan]

Thank you for that information. I think I will try Dropbox as well.

[Aleksandar Ritan]

@Adam Danz I've set up Dropbox and it's perfect for this project. There's one problem I'm having though. Matlab can't delete temporary folders created inside the Dropbox folder, nor can I save files from within matlab to the dropbox folder. How can I give Matlab the permission to modify the Dropbox folder?

[Adam Danz]

Crap.... now that you meniton it, I do recall these problems between Matlab and Dropbox.

Temp folders

What function is creating the temporary folders? Usually temporary folders and files don't need backed up and can be stored on your local disk. Matlab's tempdir function returns the name of temporary dir Matlab uses (see how to change temp dir). Mine is 'C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Temp\'.

Saving files

Saving files to the dropbox folder is a bigger issue. I don't have dropbox on the machine I've been using lately so I can't test it.

Workarounds

Well, you could try a different cloud service. I've used OneDrive and GoogleCloud but I forget if they offer version control. I also use redundent backup services on a server and on a hard drive. GitHub is a main player in version control, too.

I found this Tweet (first time I've used twitter to reference Matlab advice) suggesting to toggle the Dropbox syncing state when using Matlab and now I recall that this is what I did as well. Pro: it solves the problem. Con: If wont' backup your files until you turn the sync back on.