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VE9KK Blog

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How one click can change the day

Posted: 30 Jan 2022 01:04 PM PST http://ve3wdm.blogspot.com/2022/01/how-one-click-can-change-day.html



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.

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