Hello again!

So I purchased this to replace an aging Rocket Dock since rocket dock is no longer supported and hasn't been updated in years. I initially did it with sub-docks as I wanted to mimic the fan function of Rocket Dock and that worked well.

I have a bunch of games installed (like 30+ shortcuts). In Rocket Dock you have a maxium of 12 icons that can be shown in the fan mode, so I had these shortcuts spread out between several items to show all of the shortcuts. This translated into several sub-docks in Nexus.

I wanted to consolidate them into one sub-dock, but then the vertical layout was exceeding the space available to display all of the icons. So I was trying the grid stack item in the dock. As I finished moving items from a sub-dock to the grid stack, I was deleting the sub-docks. This worked for the first 2 sub-docks, but the third one refused to be deleted (the command didn't appear to have any effect). I moved the last few icons out of the 4th sub-dock, and then when I tried to delete it the entire dock just disappeared.

I tried a couple of reboots, but it hasn't come back, although the Winstep taskbar replacement is working just fine. I tried looking in the preferences and the dock isn't even listed (see screenshot). Is there a way to recover the other dock? It took me a few hours to set-up and if there is an easier way I would like to use it instead of having to re-do it. Sorry, I didn't do a backup, I wasn't even aware of that function until I started trying to troubleshoot this.

Thanks,
Simon

No backups? Ouch.

Not sure it isn't too late to recover, but let's try this:

First make sure you are running the latest version, v25.9. Now, in WorkShelf Preferences, go to the Advanced tab and make a Backup. Once it has finished, click on the Troubleshooting Options button and on the dialog that pops click the Check Integrity of Docks and Shelves.

What does it say?

And to be clear, you obviously did nothing wrong, what happened is 100% the program's fault (and I would very much like to be able to reproduce it here so I can fix it, nothing worse than data loss).

A lot of work was put into v25.7 to make sure you could move items between different nested containers at will, delete shelves, docks, sub-docks and grid-stacks without issues, etc, but because this is all very complex stuff the potential for unforeseen issues is always there.

No worries, I appreciate the work. Sorry, I had to run some errands. The recovery found 23 sub-docks and 2 stacks, which really sped up the recovery process. I made sure to back up the results this time.

Thanks again!

23 orphan sub-docks?! Wow. Did you really had that many or is that the result of other deletions?

Would you mind sending me the first backup you made (before the corrections) to the Winstep support address? Would like to take a look to try and understand what happened, so I can fix it and it does not happen again.

I actually had a few more before I started moving things into grid stacks. Probably 5 ish more. Sent the email.

Regards,
Simon

It just occurred to me that there is no reason not to add a "Convert to Grid Stack" option to the right click context menu of sub-docks (and perhaps "Convert to Sub-Dock" for Grid Stacks of Regular type).

It would have saved you a TON of work.

That would be a fantastic addition. A one-click “Convert to Grid Stack” would make reorganizing large docks much safer and faster, especially for people migrating from RocketDock-style setups.

Added it last night, it will be in the upcoming v26.1 release.

Useful options, unquestionably!

Useful option even if all you want to do is copy a bunch of sub-dock items somewhere else:

While docks and sub-docks only allow you to drag & drop a single item at a time, the shelves/drawers/grid stacks multi-select ability allows you to select and copy multiple items at once.

So you could temporarily turn a sub-dock into a grid stack, move multiple items to another container, and convert the grid stack back into a sub-dock.

You can already do this "trick" with parent docks by converting them into a tab in a shelf (you will be prompted to select a shelf if you have multiple shelves) and back again.

Yep, exactly the things I had in mind. Although with my minimal Windows installation and few apps used, I don't have a huge amount of apps or data to deal with, I have been considering a radical new theme with just a NextStart taskbar visible. This will involve a bit of moving things around, and this will probably come in handy as and when I get around to it.

Unfortunately I was unable to reproduce the corruption here after recovering the sub-docks from your backup into the recovery shelf and adding them back to a dock. Was able to then delete all of them one by one without issues.

Perhaps the structure corruption happened while you were originally populating all the sub-docks and only reared its ugly head when you started deleting them.

Decided to increase the robustness of drag & drop between docks, etc, and ended up going down a rabbit hole.

The end result is very positive as I added functionality and fixed old bugs, but given the amount of changes the possibility of newly introduced bugs has also increased.