[Dx4win] Lost data

[Richard L. King]

I have been having an intermittent problem with DX4WIN V5.03 for a few 
months now that is potentially serious.

Occasionally when I save the database or close DX4WIN before shutdown, I 
get an error writing the log file during the saving of my log data. When 
this happens, usually the last 80% of my log entries are lost with each 
lost entry replaced with some specific data in certain fields.

In the BAND area I get "xxxm". In the TIME area I get "0000". And in the 
MODE area it is always "AM". There may be other fields that are always 
changed to a constant, but those are the fields that I remember. This all 
gets repeated for about 60,000 QSOs and the real data is lost.

When the failure occurs, a correct log file cannot be found anywhere on my 
harddrive. What saves me is that I usually do a daily backup on a zip file 
that I update every night only before I shutdown. I use a stand-alone batch 
file to execute this backup.

My log file has 87,000 entries in it and it would be a disaster for me to 
lose that much DXing data. After the failure and I reload the log file, the 
log data is correct up to about the first 20,000 entries. But the last 
60,000 QSOs are lost being replaced with the data I mentioned above.

I don't know if there is an answer for this problem. But I do think that 
everyone should have a regular, independent method of backing up their log 
file.

Any suggestions? The problem really got scary yesterday when I had some 
problems reading my backup file on the zip drive. I eventually recovered 
the database though. Whew!

73, Richard

k5na@texas.net