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[WriteLog] Lost log file -- Advice?

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Subject: [WriteLog] Lost log file -- Advice?
From: "\(K7ZO\) Scott Tuthill" <k7zo@cableone.net>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 09:45:33 -0600
List-post: <writelog@contesting.com">mailto:writelog@contesting.com>
In last weekend's All  Asia SSB contest I came as close to totally losing a 
log file as I ever have in 12+ years of using WriteLog. NK7U and I were 
doing a casual multi-op with a network of 4 PC's running Version 10.79 under 
Windows XP. Friday evening the station suffered a momentary power loss that 
caused all the PC's to shut down. When we rebooted them, on three of the 
four PC's, the log file had no QSO's and was thus in the state the last time 
I manually saved it before the contest started, there was no journal file of 
QSO's to recover, etc. Luckily, on one of the PC's the log file was intact 
and we were able to recover and continue -- but this was a pretty scary 
experience and I have never had anything like it before.

I have all four PC's and WriteLog configured the same. Relative to log 
saving I have these INI file settings in the [CONFIGURATION] section:
* AutoSaveCount = 20
* QsoWarningCount = -1

I thought what this did was to automatically save the log's every 20 QSO's 
and suppress the display of any warning messages. I figured if the log was 
being saved, let's not bother the operators with messages.

But, with this experience I want to sort out what happened and why and make 
any adjustments so that we don't run into this again. We have never had this 
problem before and WriteLog has always recovered gracefully from similar 
situations in the past.

So, questions to all:
* It looks like the log was in fact not being automatically saved and the 
journal file process did not seem to be working. Any thoughts and ideas? I 
was looking in the default MyDocuments/WriteLog/contest directory for the 
files. This is where they should be, right?
* Are these INI file settings doing what I think they are, or have I 
misinterpreted their effect? Did the QsoWarningCount=-1 actually turn off 
the AutoSave process?
* Could the PC configuration been at fault - thinking that WriteLog 
AutoSaved the file, but the PC cached it in RAM rather than write it to 
disk, and then when the power dropped the file was lost? If so, is there a 
way to change a setting somewhere on the PC to stop this?

Thanks for any advice and thoughts.

Scott/K7ZO 


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