Moho Forum

Good morning,

My son accidentally deleted files from his USB drive that represented a fair amount of work over the past couple of weeks. I was able to recover them using a data recovery utility, but the files appear to be corrupted; when trying to open them, we receive an error saying the file cannot be opened and a further error saying there is an error parsing the JSON file.

I have looked at the file in a hex editor and it appears to be missing both header and footer tags. I experimented with replacing the existing file data with a header and footer from a good file and with inserting a header/footer before/after the data in the corrupted file, but all I get is a file that spins and never actually opens.

I'm going to teach him about some better file management practices (oh the things I never thought to mention but now really wish I had), so my real question is: does anyone have suggestions on how to recover as much data as possible out of this file so that he can salvage as much of his work as possible?

I'd have to see the JSON file (the Project.mohoproj when you open a Moho file as a ZIP archive) to know how much can be salvaged. Unless you're familiar with the file format's data structure, it'd be pretty hard to salvage a file by intelligent guesswork.

So that's interesting... I looked at a valid .moho file and I can see what you mean about opening it like an archive and finding the .mohoproj file in it. The recovered files I pulled up aren't opening like an archive, which would make sense why it is having a hard time parsing the JSON file....the structure must have been corrupted in the recovery process.

I'm guessing there isn't much that can be done, is there?

Yeah, if you can't use a zip utility, like 7zip, WinRar, etc., to "open archive" or "extract files" from a .moho, then the zip archive itself is probably hosed.

That's what I feared - good to know...thank you for the information!