Recover corrupt KeepNote filestructure

<update>Further investigation has shown that data has been restored, but the tree structure isn’t perfect. Use at own risk</update>
Anyone who’s taken Offensive Security training should be familiar with KeepNote (similar to Leo, for those that took early versions of the courses). If you’re not familiar with KeepNote it does exactly what you’d expect from the name, provide a handy way to keep and organise information. And it does a good job of this, until….

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/keepnote/gui/__init__.py", line 469, in open_notebook
    version = notebooklib.get_notebook_version(filename)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/keepnote/notebook/__init__.py", line 248, in get_notebook_version
    raise NoteBookError(_("Notebook preference data is corrupt"), e)
NoteBookError: SyntaxError('junk after document element: line 11, column 0',)
Notebook preference data is corrupt
root@bt:~/pwbv3/labnotes#

Aaaarrgh!
After much searching I found several posts discussing similar issues but following the same resolutions did not resolve by problems. With this I resorted to my fallback plan, create new notebook and begin to repopulate with my content (each node is stored as a plain text file, so I was looking at lots of cut and paste). Then a thunderbolt hit me.
I copied each branch of the original note tree to the new tree, and hay-presto! functioning notebook retained and disaster averted.

cp -r ~/old-notebook/branch/ ~/new-notebook/.

Of course a better solution is just to hit the ‘File>Backup Notebook’ option occasionally.
–Andrew Waite