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by tannerbrockwell 2054 days ago
This went from a cloud / local app to 100% cloud only storage. If you have a library of content locally that you have NOT submitted to the cloud storage, then it won't show up on the update.

I went and used time machine to get an old version of the app and removed the upgrade.yml from the contents of the app package as well, so it won't auto upgrade.

This was a really bad handling of the upgrade. It is unrealistic to expect that someone with a large enough library of content locally to also put this all in the cloud for storage. I have a curated library of content so I can work offline.

3 comments

We got your back. We actually release a 1.x version that won't upgrade you if you want to stay local:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PolarBookshelf/comments/j9yfbx/pola...

The 2.0 upgrade won't and can't auto-upgrade because 2.0 is far far far more secure and we wanted to keep it that way.

2.0 is very locked up in a sandbox so it can't actually access your disk. 1.x should be secure but 2.0 radically reduces the chance of breaking out of a jail and to do automatic upgrade would have required us to relax this significantly.

You can just drag and drop your .polar directory into 2.0 and it will migrate all your 1.x data for you or you can just stick to the 1.x version I linked to above.

I would have loved to make it auto-upgrade but we just couldn't do it..

I am very unhappy with this change.

I always liked that I could keep my ebooks/Polar Libary in my Nextcloud, but now it sounds like that isn't possible anymore :-/

I tried the cloud version in the past, but it had only disadvantages for me.

Exactly. But I am glad that forced me to look at other options and found Emacs pdf-tools mode which is amazing
I'm one of the founders at Polar. 3 quick things:

1. your data is 100% NOT lost. Just pull in your local Polar directory and it'll all be in the cloud 2. we increased the storage for any existing user to 2 GB to support somewhat larger libraries 3. we released an updated stable version of the latest 1.0 release for anybody who wants to keep the local directory