Text Clippings are all empty

[Zane Rhys]

I have been pulling text clippings of my eBay and Etsy descriptions for years and saving them in a folder so that I could just highlight and drag them in without having to retype everything each time. Today, I went to open and drop a text clipping and there was nothing in it. At the top it says (for example: HAND PAINTED BURLEIGH WARE P.textClipping) but it is completely blank. At the bottom it says. Clipping contents: unknown

Current clippings that I have done in 2016 are readable but every saved clipping from 2015 as far back as 2006 is completely blank. Even on my external hard drive back-up. I am not really that technically savvy regarding computers though I seem to do moderately ok, but I confess I am fairly stressed out about this. We are talking many hundreds of descriptions. Any ideas on how to recover all of these text clippings? Thanks in advance.

Hierocles

 

[Zane Rhys]

These are the different things that show up when I am looking at them in the folder: Everyone of them has the greyed out quote.

When I double click on a text clipping I get the blank.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

open up Text Edit then drag a clipping onto a Text Edit window ... you should be able to save it now so it will be editable

 

[Zane Rhys]

thank you for your message. However, that does not work. When I drag the text clipping into Textedit, it is still blank. I have included a screenshot of the file in Textedit - no matter what text clipping I drag in I get the same grey message (some obscure quote) and they all say Text Clipping - Zero bytes. Literally there is nothing in these text clippings and I am desperate to figure out why they disappeared and I am puzzled as to why text clippings that I highlight and drag to my desk top now work just fine.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

I have only been able to find one other occurrence of this issue, unfortunately the thread is old & unresolved.
Text clippings are empty
The writing I can see in the text clippings, you say this is just some random quote & not the saved text?

What Mac OS X version are you on? Have you just updated your version?

 

[Zane Rhys]

The writing you see in the text clipping is a random quote that shows up in every text clipping when I view it as you see in the screen shot. It is not the saved text. But when I double click on any one of them it's just blank. I am using El Capitan OS X version 10.11.2 I discovered early today that any text clipping I saved after October 2015 is still intact but everything from September all the way back to 2004 is now blank. I can't say how long it has been like this as I just recently went back to a folder with 2014 Text Clippings a couple of days ago and that is when I noticed the problem.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

is october 2015 a significant month for any reason?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Did you install El Capitan on or around the date that the text clippings stopped working - i.e. October 2015? I am not totally sure about this, but maybe Apple changed the format of the way text clippings are stored in El Capitan. Previously, the text in a text clipping was stored in the resource fork of the file, which is not readable by many applications. That is why the drag and drop into a TextEdit document workflow is used.

Since all of the text clippings since October are readable, it sounds as if Apple may have changed them to store the text in a normal fashion - like a standard text file. If so, there was an application in the Xcode Developer Tools called DeRez that can read the resource fork. I am not sure if that app is still in the current version of the Xcode Dev Tools however.

Just a thought,

C

 

[Zane Rhys]

Perhaps it does have something to do with El Capitan as it was released in September of 2015 and I am pretty sure I most likely installed it right around the time it was available. There were many things going at the time so chances are I didn't even look at older text clippings. It was also around that same time that almost every photo from pre- October 2015 completely vanished from my computer and external hard drive. Fortunately I had saved the majority of the photos on a flash drive.

But if that were the case and there is no longer an app in the current version of Xcode Dev Tools to read them wouldn't more people be affected with unreadable text clippings?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Yes, strange issue indeed.

DeRe isn't a normal end-user application, which is why it was only included with Xcode Dev Tools. There must be some cause for the issue you are experiencing, or there would be many more reports of it around the Internet as you suggest.

Do you have another Mac that you could try and open the files on using your USB flash drive?

C

 

[Zane Rhys]

Greetings. I tried opening the files on another Mac but it is still the same. There is nothing when you open them and the clipping itself shows zero bytes.

 

[Cory Cooper]

OK...hmmm.

-Were these text clippings ever moved from computer to computer, or emailed? Sometimes that can strip the resource fork from the file, which is where the text resides.
-Would you be willing to compress a couple of them into a ZIP file and upload it somewhere so we can troubleshoot it further?

C

 

[Zane Rhys]

Yes these text clippings were transferred over from an older mac to a new mac but that that has been over a year ago and everything worked fine up until I tried this month to open them. I would certainly be willing to compress a few into a zip file and upload it. Is there a location you have in mind? As I mentioned in the beginning of this ordeal I am not always the most technically savvy so thank you in advance for the help and patience.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

you can upload one here … if you control-click or right-click a text clipping there will be an option to compress it. then just click 'upload a file' in your reply here & choose the compressed zip file.

I'd certainly be interested to have a look even though I'm stumped ….

 

[Zane Rhys]

So sorry - I have been unavailable for a few days. I have compressed and uploaded a couple of the text clippings. Again, thank you so much for everyone's help with this mystery.

 

[Cory Cooper]

OK...thanks. I will play with them a little to see if I can find anything.

A few quick Terminal commands on them, and it looks like the resource fork (where the text is actually stored) has been stripped from the files somehow.

-Are they still stored on the older Mac, and do you have access to it?

I will keep at it and let you know,

C

 

[Zane Rhys]

No, the older Mac is gone and I no longer have access to them in any other format except my back up external hard drive - and they are all the same on that as well.