So I had some trouble with Buddy today.

First it wouldn't open. It would start up, think for a few seconds, and then die. I had an issue before where the file holding current currency info got corrupted when Buddy got confused from not being able to update the currency online and corrupted its own file. That prevented Buddy from starting again. I figured out that I had to delete /opt/buddy/data/.currencycache to get it to start again. Last time deleting this file allowed Buddy to start normally, but on this occasion deleting it didn't make any difference.

At this point I noticed something strange. There was no .buddy.db in /opt/buddy. Rather, there was a file .buddy.db.encrypted. I knew that I hadn't set a password in Buddy, so I thought that was pretty strange. A week old backup of the entire directory /opt/buddy/data I put on my SD card didn't contain any .encrypted file, just the .buddy.db and some other files.

So I decided I would try messing around to get Buddy started again. I would have emailed krk969 directly, but last time I tried doing that, I didn't get a helpful response, and had to figure it out for myself. I thought I was being careful - I made a backup of the .buddy.db.encrypted file and the other files in the directory, but I made a crucial mistake - unlike last time, when I put the backup files in a different directory, this time I kept the backups in the same directory, /opt/buddy/data, with .bak extensions. Little did I know that after messing a bit, I opened Buddy and it reset itself and DELETED the entire contents of /opt/buddy/data, including all the copies I had made with the .bak extension.

Great. So my entire data is now gone (the week old backup helps somewhat, but that's still a week of budget data gone that I can't recreate). And I never did figure out what was causing Buddy to crash on startup. Now it has simply reset itself AND cleaned out the entire /opt/buddy/data directory, including the backups I had saved there.

Is there any development of this application still going on? It is a paid app, and in fact I have paid krk969 twice to support this app, but I haven't seen any updates for a while, and like I said, last time I tried to contact him with the above mentioned bug he didn't respond and I ended up figuring it out by myself (by deleting the .currencycache file).

This is a good app, with some (strange) limitations, and it would be good to see development continue and ongoing bugs fixed. Especially as it is a paid app.