We all have read about backing up your PC in the event your beloved hard drive will just stop spinning out the information you have become accustomed to. I am sure most of us have added a few gray hairs when all our info vanished with the greetings of the blue screen of death (in the case of Windows) At that point in time the little voice in our subconscious whispers "just resort to the backup.....oh that's right there is NONE!!
Well, I am here to say that I did not have a hard drive failure and if I did I have a dedicated drive with clone backups of my main hard drive and another separate drive with image backups. These backups are done on a regular basis and in fact, I have had to go down the restore road twice now and it has worked amazingly.
My click of the mouse was during my just being bored and "clicking" around my logging program N3FJP logger. I still am not sure what I did but somehow I deleted my whole log...yup 16,000 contacts GONE! Well, not a big deal I thought as I also upload my contacts to LOTW, Club log, QRZ.COM and Eqsl. Soooo Eqsl I just could not figure out how you can even export contacts so that option was out. QRZ.COM you can export your log but first, you have to be a paid member and I am not. The free version only allows you to upload and I have no issue with that at all. I was then off to club log and for the life of me I searched everywhere and I could not find any link to download the complete log............having said that I know there is going to be a comment posted that explains it and I missed it. Well next is LOTW and again I could not find anything there.
Now I did post a question on N3JFP's contest logger IO groups site and Scott (The developer of the software) got back to me right away. Before I go on yes Scott is the developer but not just him it's his wife Kimberly and his son Chris who work as a team it just happened to be Scott that got back to me. He gave me a suggestion that also got me to think. Long story short I did find out that within the N3FJP logger program you can request LOTW to download a complete copy into N3FJP. Excellent my issue has been resolved.........not so fast!
It did download a complete copy of the log BUT the number in which the contacts were entered was reversed......so my first contact was numbered 16001 and my most recent was 1 ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!.
It was time for tea and some relaxation as really in the big picture it's a hobby and not the code for a missile launch. The next day I was reading the email again that Scott had sent me and at the bottom of the email there was a link. It was a bot in which you entered your question and the bot did the search. Low and behold the bot gave me info on how N3FJP automatically stored a backup of the log. I found the backup and was thrilled. So I deleted the complete log again (on purpose this time) and restored my log using this back up and I was back in biz!!
The lesson of the day is yes you may have a backup for your PC and I do BUT being a ham a log backup is also very important just in case like me you end up clicking your mouse one too many times and well.....you read the possible results.
4 comments:
Hello Mike, in eQSL you can scroll down on your outbox page and you can download the complete ADIF of your uploaded contacts. I didn't find a link in clublog same for Lotw. Personally I update a copy of my log via dropbox automatically. Logs in my main logbook are all coupled with this copy. Till now I never lost my log (43000 contacts), and I hope I never will. Good luck restoring the log. 73, Bas
Good morning Bas nice to hear from you, well look at that and the other day I thought I search everywhere within Eqsl. Now I know and I was able to restore my log book from a backup file within N3FJP logger. I was just short contacts from a week ago but I did have that file on my desktop and I was able to restore the log and it's all up to date.
Have a nice week and 73,
Mike
VE9KK
You've made me very nervous now. Not because I don't back up my home PC often enough, but because I don't backup my Work PCs enough. I think I'd better get my act together. Shame on me!
Glad you sorted yours Mike.
73, Tom, M7MCQ.
Good morning Tom, most of the time if your hard drive is on it's way out there are signs BUT if your commonly used software program is going to have an issue a lot of the time it just happens. Or if you are using the program like me and not paying attention and just hit the the "ok" button without reading the fine print you may be in for a surprise.
I was like everyone else when it came to backing up my PC it was something I was going to do later....then later came and I did not have things backed up. I have had one huge issue with my PC were I lost everything. I did have a clone and image backup on 2 other drives and moved the clone over (it was about a week old so I did not have anything on the clone that I did within the week) and I was up and running again in a 1/2 hour.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
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