PERRLA

[Merlin]

So, I have been working with Perrla for a while and I was about to recommend that folks take a look at it, but I just ran into an issue that is making me rethink that.

At least I think the online version may not be ready for prime time as yet. I just a big chunk of work due to some glitch. I was done with all but the last section of my paper and logged in tonight to finish it up and start on the next one when I discovered the last 3 sections that I completed, plus all the edits and other work I did, are now gone. As if I never worked on them at all. It's in the same state where I left it yesterday. Since I'm using the cloud version, it saves like ever 5 minutes so it isn't a matter if not saving.

I've got a ticket open with them but in the meantime I'm going back to Word.

I think EndNote has an online version, but it's mostly used as an add-on for Word.

Luckily the papers I'm working on aren't so complicated to require something as robust as EndNote or Mendeley, but I did consider those options. I want to give Perrla a chance to fix this before I decide to pull the plug for good since I liked the tool up until this point.

In the meantime, I finished up the writing I needed for the final section of the paper in Word, so if I can restore the work from Friday, I should be done with the paper.

I'm working with the Perrla customer service team to try and restore the lost work. They have a versioning system so they can roll back to earlier saves, but so far they all look the same. So part of me is wondering whether I had some glitch on my end that was caching stuff oddly or something.

They sent me the saves log and one thing I did notice is that it looks like they didn't make any saves in the last two hours of my work, which suggests there may have been something weird on my side. From what they tell me if there were changes made during that time, they were likely lost since they didn't get saved, or they were somehow deleted. The CS rep is working with their engineering team to see if they can see if there is a way to restore the lost data, but it doesn't look promising.

My guess is that I'll just have to redo the middle sections of my paper. I mostly know what I wrote the first time so it should go faster, but it's still annoying to have to redo work. It's going to end up wasting several hours that I could be working on my second paper. Of course, by now I've also wasted several hours just going back and forth with CS.