Is there a function to anonymize all living persons?

Gramps desktop v 5.2.2
MacOS Ventura

For the last couple of days I have been struggling with getting Grams Web Sync to work correctly.
Suddenly I noticed that all living persons had been anonymized. First name was overwritten with “[Alive]”, but last name was still there. Birth data are gone, but relationship information is still there. Old persons without a dead record, but considered dead (born more than 100 years ago), are all untouched.
Wondering how this have happened. Could I without knowing have activated a function, that will overwrite all living persons?
‘Last change date’ has not been updated.

Are we talking about these people having a [Living] given name in your online Gramps Web site? Or, in the local Gramps (for Desktops) after syncing?

The [Living] is in both Gramps desktop and in Gramps Web, but I have done a lot of syncing (bidirectional), so I don’t know where the change occurred.

Ok. That is a really worrying possibility that the Sync brought in the “living” placeholders for the Desktop version.

Please check to see what backups (for the Gramps for Desktops) that you have archived.

Do you have a backup that predates those placeholders being in the tree?

Looking at my backups I’m pretty sure that the data change happened when running sync the first time after setting up Gramps Web.

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Just to be sure: How did you initialize the web version of your tree?

I initialized Gramps Web by importing a Gramps export (.gramps file) at the very first start and creating the admin account at the same time.

OK, thanks, but that still leaves a question: Was that a full export, like a backup, or did you export using privacy settings that might have anonymized living persons? I’m asking, because you might have done that to protect their information on the web, and if you did, it might explain why their obscured names flowed back to your main tree during the web sync.

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I think you hit the nail. Quite sure, that I ran an export as I was not sure whether the export gramps XML and backup format are the same.
And looking at the export function, it is most likely that I ran the export, so living persons name are overwritten.
Thanks a lot.
Claus

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Note that the export itsel is not a problem, because you can do an export wil all people, all data, and full names, and in that case, the export is exactly the same a a backup. The problem is in the settings that you may have changed, to protect people from visibility on the web, which is something that the web version of Gramps should take care of by itself, like other programs do, running on well known sites.

When I send a GEDCOM to a public site, I send all people, with full names, because I know that the site will protect them, and only show full names and dates to people that I invite there. I do use the privacy option however, because some dead people have notes with living descendants in them, or messages from people who ask me to protect their identities. This means that in my tree, some sources are marked as private too, so that their authors’ names are invisible.

This procedure is safe, because I never do a full sync with these sites, but if you do sync, a full export is the best safeguard against backwash.

I must add, that I never used Gramps web sync myself, and have no idea whether it tells you what data might be overwritten when you sync, but IMO it is a must. I know by experience that some other programs do that, and some don’t.

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