To get back to my original problem: How to get notebooks corrupted by the Wolfram IDE back again?

I think I have found a manual procedure to recover from the problem described above. It is tedious but worked twice in my cases. If you have such a corrupted notebook within the Wolfram cloud, which can no longer be opened, e.g. "xmp.nb", then:

1. Make a copy of it within the cloud. E.g to "xmp(1).nb".

2. Download this copy to your local PC.

3. Open it there with some standard text-editor, e.g. Windows Editor. Fortunatly these ".nb"-notebooks are ASCII text and they are readable.

4. Find large regions of cryptic output. Sometimes (normaly?/always?) they start with "CompressedData[" and consist of an endless sequence like "/…", where "…" are some cryptic ASCII-strings of different lengths. All this sequence is surrounded by apostrophs.

5. Find the next closing bracket "]".

6. Delete everything between "CompressedData[" until the next closing bracket "]". But keep the opening and closing apostrophes in between. This is tedious and may take some time. And it drives you angious since you delete 90 or even 99.9% of your file thereby.If you do that in several manual Select/Delete-actions (which I recommend), then save your file in between, to be sure.

7. When you have finished, save your file and quit the editor. The size of your local file "xmp(1).nb" should now have decreased dramatically. Say from some tens of megabytes to some tens or hundreds of kilobytes.

8. Upload that file ("xmp(1).nb") back into the Wolfram cloud. This gives "xmp(2).nb" in my case. But you can override the previous useless, corrupted version as well if your IDE allows it. Mine doesn't, strange enough.

9. Try to open that file within web and/or desktop.

10. If that works: Check your notebook, if you lost something. Maybe you have to correct things manually. Thereafter just rename that working notebook to "xmp.nb" and kill all those copies in between (cloud and locally).

11. If that does not work: Sorry for you. But you still have your original corrupted "xmp.nb" and can try to do other things with it. Let me know.

All in all for me the Wolfram product structure is very confusing and "over-marketed". There are so many different products with different options each (online, desktop, local, cloud, credits, API-calls, storage, kernels, computing time, ....).

It's really difficult to get to reasonable work, instead of investigating what is what.

Home Edition is the "true" standalone desktop version, not Cloud depending. For private use, and at a substantial discount. Searching for it on this site gives:

Edit: I checked the pricing. Mathematica Home Edition is actually cheaper than Programming Lab Standard. For one year, respectively:

• 240 EUR for Programming Lab Standard
• 155 EUR for Mathematica Home Edition

So if you are not using WL in a commercial context, it looks like the Home Edition is the better bet. With regards to both performance and price.

Why not Mathematica Home edition? Just call the german dealer. I do not sell Mathematica, but if you want you can also call me.

You are probably much better off using the desktop version only for data-intensive calculations, no cloud at all. Years ago I did professional consulting project with Gigabytes of data and all went fine, locally. I have no idea how I would do some real project using (public) cloud. Maybe with the Wolfram Enterprise private cloud that would be possible. But that seems still somewhat expensive.

Great! Thank you. I did not know that.

For the PL-desktop that option is in menu Advanced > Cell > Delete All Output

BTW: There are more things, which are very strange and prove that the Wolfram programmers are unable to handle their IDE: (I am still talking about WL-Programming Lab-Desktop).

The whole startup is a joke. Nonsense-windows that have to be opened until I get to my program (described elsewhere).

In each notebook I have File-Options "Save" and "Save to Cloud" which obviously do the same. Or not? Who knows?

I save a notebook and then close it. Then I am asked, if I want to save it again. Horrible! What happens? But I have no chance but saying Yes and pray, that the IDE will not kill my program.

I have no real idea what is saved where.

I assume that nothing is stored or replicated to my own PC. They keep me fully dependent on their cloud. And like to kill my programs thereby - see above. Although they claim to give me with that heavily payed desktop-license the possibility to develop locally.

Sometimes the UI just freezes. No idea when and why.

I love the Wolfram Language. This is really impressive and very intelligent what can be done with it.

Strange enough the IDE is anything else than intelligent. It is stupid and filled with bugs.

Hmm, for me this is quite strange thinking, since it passes the responsibilty for trivial save-operations to me instead of the IDE.

If the IDE thinks, it cannot save a notebook/program (But why? Can somebody think on any reason under a working Internet-connection?), it should tell that together with the reason and stop in an ordered manor. But not just destroy the program.

That the IDE tries to save a multiple of the data in use, i.e. fullform-output instead of shortform, and then kills everything thereon is ridiculous.

The error-messages and recovery-procedure (see above: Syntax error, plain text opening) are all wrong and do not work.

All of those are nothing but bugs, which render the Wolfram-PL-IDE very dangerous to use. Practically unusable.

You say, I should delete all output before saving. OK, but how? Manually? Tens or Hundreds of outputs, one after the other by manually deleting all those output cells? Or ist there a command for that? I could not find something like that.

All in all there remain two facts: 1) The Wolfram IDE Programming Lab IDE is dangerous since it destroys programs during save into the Wolfram cloud. 2) Basically the problem comes from not storing programs locally on my PC, but this cloud-nonsense instead.

BTW: I think this idea of storing things within internet-clouds instead of locally and without a local copy in 1:1 structure is some of the biggest nonsense that IT-people invented during the last 10 years or so. It started on smartphones with nonsense-terms like "photos, music, videos, documents, hubs" etc. and propagated to PCs meanwhile. Nobody knows anymore since then what is stored where and when and under which exact name and which file attributes. And what is replicated where and if at all. Actually all those are just files within some directory-structure. Vendors try everything to hide that from customers since then.

This is particularly true for a product like Wolfram Programming Lab Desktop, which is aimed to allow for local development, but cannot live an hour without an online connection to the Wolfram cloud. And then - to make things a desaster - just destroys files in their cloud.

If I imagine, I would have to develop a huge program (as I did for tenths of years in many different IDEs) with such an IDE with hundreds of files and some tricky directory structure, I think it would be a real nightmare.