Hi

I had all my favourites split into folders to make them easier to get to. But for some reason, yesterday I opened RD Tabs and the folders were gone but the favourites were still there. The most recent thing I had done on my computer was install .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 though I can't imagine how that'd have affected RD Tabs. Typically I hadn't backed up my favourites in a while. I have some old exported favourites with the correct structure, is there any easy way to merge it or recover the folders please?

I'm using v 2.1.17.

RD Tabs stores all favorites in a single linear list. Folders are derived through a property in the favorite which indicates how it should be displayed. Additionally, there's a tree structure which outlines the folders you create (so that empty folders can exist). If there is a mismatch between the folder structure in the favorites list and the folder tree, RD Tabs assumes something was corrupted and dumps the favorite into the root folder (it is even possible to temporarily have two favorites with the same display name in the root folder because of this). What I should proably do is recreate the folder from what is in the favorites' folder property rather than put it into the root folder. I can't say specifically what caused this, but likely your RD Tabs user.config got corrupted somehow. If you see NO folders, then the folder tree node in the user.config was the corrupted XML node.

The good news is that RD Tabs does not automatically nuke old version's user.config files. That's why the "Profile Cleanup Utility" exists under the Tools menu. So, as long as you have not used that tool to clean up previous RD Tabs config files, you can go to the version immediately prior to the current version and fetch the favorites and folder state from there (assuming you haven't made any large changes). If all you need is the folder structure and you can live with moving the favorites back into the folder structure, you only need to replace EVERYTHING in the <setting name="FavoritesFolders" serializeAs="Xml"> node. If you want to recover favorites' position in the folder tree, you will also need to copy the <setting name="FavoritesCollection" serializeAs="Xml"> node (which is usually pretty huge).

The XML files are stored in the local appdata store, which in Vista is under C:\Users\<Username>\appdata\local\Avian_Waves\RDTabs.exe_Url_<GUID>\<version>

Be sure to back up the latest user.config (at least) before modifying it. Also, you must make any XML modifications with RD Tabs closed, or else RD Tabs will overwrite your changes with its in-memory cached version.

Thanks Tim.

I had resorted to exporting the favourites to an XML and then manually setting the <encodedFavoriteFolderPath> for each shortcut based on an old export. Took me a while and I'm sure there would have been an easier way, but it's done now. Thanks for the detailed response though. Hopefully it won't happen again.