Tips & Tricks to salvage tiddlers from a corrupted single file TiddlyWiki

Sometime a tiddlywiki can get corrupted due to an incompatible plugin, a user error or a faulty save. You should always do backups, but if you didn’t, here are some things you can try to get back your tiddlers.

:warning: Always keep a backup of the original file before trying any of these !

1. Restarting the wiki in safe mode

https://tiddlywiki.com/#SafeMode

In the url, after the .html, add #:safe then refresh the page. This will disable all plugin, then you can go to $:/AdvancedSearch, in the tab “Filter” use the filter “[!is[system]sort[title]]” and click the export button. You will get a .json file. Next, go to https://tiddlywiki.com/empty.html, drag and drop your json inside to import your tiddlers and hit save.

2. Using the upgrader

Drag and drop your tiddlywiki file in the upgrader, uncheck plugin related tiddlers and see if this fix your issue.

3. Using node.js

Drag and drop your tiddlywiki file into a node.js tiddlywiki. With a bit of luck you will be able to import all of your tiddlers, which will be saved individually. Then you can delete the faulty plugin tiddlers and re-import your tiddlers back to a fresh tiddlywiki.

4. Using the javascript console

Hit the F12 button on your keyboard, or right click anywhere on the page, select “inspect”. This will open the browser dev tools. Go to the console tab and paste this command :

$tw.wiki.getTiddlersAsJson("[!is[system]sort[title]]")

Hit enter, you will see a json file printed in the console. Right click the output, select “copy object” (or “copy string contents”). Alternatively, if your browser support it, use this command to automatically copy the output to the clipboard :

copy($tw.wiki.getTiddlersAsJson("[!is[system]sort[title]]"))

Then, create a text file, paste inside. Rename the file to .json, and drag and drop your json file to a fresh tiddlywiki.

5. Using a code editor

If nothing works, you can always try to open your tiddlywiki file with a code editor (e.g visual studio code), search for “tiddlywiki-tiddler-store” and copy all the content inside the script tags. Then paste it into a new text file, change the extension to json, import it to tiddlywiki, etc.

If you dont want to download a code editor, you can use a web based code editor like https://github.dev.

This post is a wiki post, if you want to share your solutions feel free to edit it !

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