Help! NV initialize error “could not be unserialized” - (trying to recover Database)

[stawastawa]

Greetings, I am trying to recover my “notes and settings” file to access my notes from the past few years. Can someone give me more information about this error and perhaps point me toward some tools to try and get my information back. I have a few candidates, but none of them open when I point NV at them. Instead I get this error:
“Unable to initialize notes database in
[folder] because the data could not be unserialized.”
I have a few ideas but no way to follow up and investigate them. Help!
Can you point me in a direction and offer some things (and tools) to try/use? None of the files open with a plist editor.

What does this error mean!
-Is the file correct but missing something?
-Has the data been decompressed but wont format right to load?
-I did not have encryption on so I don’t think that is an issue.
-are all versions of NV compatible? is it just an old file?
-If someone can give me information on the compression method maybe thats a place to start and try and dig some of the information out of the database file… somehow find a chunk of it… … Help!

I think it is one of these, I think they need to be truncated to around the first 615kb.
f77017936 copy HOPE.txt
f122206208 copy hoping.txt

Here they are truncated to my best guess... (somewhere after appearance of NSMutableSet):
f77017936 copy dir20 copy trunc.txt
f122206208 copy hoping Truncated.txt

[stawastawa]

Huzzah! I used 0xED and was able to truncate the file successfully.

how? my eyeballs basically... I noticed that NSmutableset and Troot appear near the end of existing functioning files. But there are some other gobblydegook characters after that. I had a sense of where I might need to truncate, but was unable to do so in text edit. thats where I was stuck.

Then I got 0xED to look at the file (for another reason), but decided to look for the ending too. I noticed that there was a hex character at the end that does not appear as text in text edit. Followed by several null characters and then more gobledegook. Truncating here worked! I was able to restore two files (which were recovered using photorec after wiping my HD) and now have all my notes again! time to go back up and synch with simplenote!

image attached.