Whiteboard on NC 30 (Hub 9) not saving

I’m having difficulty getting whiteboard to work properly. The whiteboard application opens okay, but when I close a board I’ve worked on, the file is not saved.

I believe this is also affecting my server’s ability to allow collaborative editing. Any suggestions?

I have here on two different Nextcloud servers (30.0.1) the same problem. Looks like there are more affected …?

Just a quick question: You guys did install the Whiteboard backend server and then configure it accordingly under Administration Settings → Whiteboard, right?

https://github.com/nextcloud/whiteboard#backend

1 Like

Yes, the server is installed and is also connected in the administration settings. When it is connected I can see the little circle in the right upper corner with the initial letter of the user name.

I’m getting good behavior most of the time, but occasionally it will get into a state of not saving data for a session. Also, sometimes it seems to spontaneously lose edits. Sometimes it will lose edits, but then recover them once something is added to the board. (Sounds like maybe an exception happens and re-applies a change buffer to an older version of the board.)

P.S. I’ve also seen it clear out all existing data when I try ctrl-Z to undo. I think this happens when I open the board, add an object, then ctrl-Z.
P.P.S. I’m also wondering if leaving the browser window inactive will eventually timeout the connection. I have had someone report that when returning to the window the board is gone and the file list is showing. Also, that person said he saw the message “unable to connect to the whiteboard server”. I observed my “docker ps” whiteboard process says it’s been up for 15 minutes … which I had not restarted in days.

There also seems to be a 404 error when clicking on old versions of the files.

It’d be nice if progress would save periodically, so at least not as much would be lost if problems occur.

If docker thinks it hasn’t been running very long, then I’m assuming the whole whiteboard server crashed. Is that a Node problem? Or might it be an application problem? Wondering if changing the version of Node would help.

Maybe you can see something in the logs…

docker logs -t --follow <CONTAINER ID>

or if you have assigned a name:

docker logs -t --follow <NAME>

Thanks for the commands. I’m not all that familiar with docker yet.

I do see where the server has restarted at various times. It seems generally that it thinks someone has joined just before the restart. There’s not a whole lot of things in the log that look particularly explanatory about the problems we’ve seen.

I’ve also been noticing that in one of the drawings someone was using a few images (five or six it would seem). One of the images seemed to go missing when I was editing. I’m learning that the images seem to be related to the “files” reported. I think there aren’t enough files reported when one goes missing. I also notice that some file identifiers (random strings) are single-quoted and some are not. If I add an image that goes missing later (after I re-open), then adding the image again will make it appear in the empty locations as well.

I’m having the same issue described above. Collaborative editing works fine and then randomly the whiteboard will disappear. Or you close it and when reopened it will be in the state of an hour ago. I also get the 404 errors when trying to load previous versions.

1 Like

Lost a bunch of work today. Gutted! Shouldn’t have trusted that this was stable without testing it extensively beforehand. Unfortunately just got straight in the zone.