Recovering Workspace on New Computer?

Hi Folks,
I unfortunately had to have reimage my computer and reinstall everything fresh. I was able to save recover my old KNIME workspace with over 100 workflows and point to this folder as my new workspace. So cool.

However, some of my workflows open just fine, while others open with some nodes missing (and obviously workflows broken). But more concerning is that some workflows don’t load at all and open up with no nodes at all. Just a single annotation box. This is catastrophic, since rebuilding these would take hundreds of hours.

Has anyone encountered this issue before? I will try anything to get these workflows back.

Thanks,
Camilo

Could you give us more insights? For example what the message box says or what the single node is.

Also you could try and set the log level to debug and try to open such a workflow and see what it says.

Also always keep a copy of the original backup in case your tries would do additional damage.

If you have versions of your backup you could try and use one from a day or two before your computer crashed. It might be that the latest backup already included structural damages from your hard drive.

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Hello Camillo99!

I have done something similar a year or two ago, but did not recall exactly how I did it. So I tested again with a small four node workflow. I even worked between my laptop with KNIME 4.1.3 on W10 and power computer W7U and KNIME 4.2.0.

One reason why this may work is that I have the same names for my default workflow and the workflow groups. And I should guess that 4.1.3 and 4.2.0 are close enough for this to work.

This is how I reproduced a worki8ng senario.

  1. Make certain you got the same directory structure and same version of KNIME
  2. Same directory structure for those files you eventually read and write.
  3. Make tiniest possible new workflow "TinyWF’ into a directory name on same “hight” as your troublesome workflow had on the old computer, but with another workflow group name like “my_workflow_copies”.
  4. Copy one of your problematic workflow copies (one that you haven’t tampered with on the new computer) (I use the name of that as “pWF” below) to the directory which contains the “my_workflow_copies”. You of cause copy the enire workflow directory there.
  5. In the KNIME Explorer you can see the “TinyWF”, but you cannot (at least not on W7U) see the pWF there, even if in the Explorer clicks the “refresh the view” button (bent arrows). In my case I could see it after a restart of KNIME.
  6. (still on the new computer) File…Export KNIME workflow, and you will have an exported wf in your documents - at least don’t produce it in/under any of the workflow groups, or the default. This may not matter but that´s how I did it - less entanglement of what KNIME could do.
  7. Now, go to the directory where the exported .knwf is and then drag the wf to the wf group with the same name as you had on the old computer, and you should get an import dialog, and hopefully everything goes ok!

I know this can be tiresome to do, but if it works you can after the first test start off with copying a handful of the old directories between each restart of KNIME (step 5.).

I do not know if these steps can be simplified or not, as long as it workes for me, I was happy to use it when I needed it…

Regards,

Ingemar

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