Unitrunker - Serious Flaw

[FLANO]

Rick,

I've been monitoring a mutli-site TRS, for which I had collected a significant amount of data on during the past months. Today, when I came home from work, Unitrunker must have lost the signal for some time and COMPLETELY overwrote and wiped out all of the learned data from the past months...no backup :< I experienced this routinely on the first beta, especially if I changed from one TRS to another. But this wasn't the case today, it was the same TRS with existing data.

I know this subject was addressed in earlier posts, but there has to be some fail safe built into the program to back-up data that already exists before overwriting the data. Some of the information that I recovered is lost until an event presents itself again. VERY, VERY frustrating...

I've sung praises of this program to you and others in my area. I love using this program as it has helped me out in ID'ing entities, but this is a very heavy price to pay for not having any capability to back-up the data within the program. Yes, I could have manually copied all of the files to another directory and made the back-ups that way, but, please reconsider a way to back up the data automatically. At the very least, do not allow the program to overwrite a file, when data exists already, IF the system thinks it has to start over again with a TRS. I know it's easier said than done, but to just arbitrarily wipe out data is not good business either...

Sorry, just very frustrated with the loss of some very uncoverable data and for now, I can't trust the system to lose my data, so I'll have to back-up my data every time manually....

John
SE of Tucson

[mikey60]

I have two comments:

First, Unitrunker is in public BETA release. When running Beta software, there is always the possibility (or probability) that bugs in the software may cause data loss. That's the chance you take when running a Beta version of any software.

Second, Backing up your data is always your responsibility. Rick could add in some backup routines into the program to copy files, but that takes away from fixing the other bugs that are discovered in other areas of the program. No matter how much backup functionality is added to the program, if you don't back up your own files, you will eventually lose your data, either through accidental deletion, or hardware issues( hard disk crash, corruption, et.)

Mike

[FLANO]

Originally Posted by mikey60

I have two comments:

First, Unitrunker is in public BETA release. When running Beta software, there is always the possibility (or probability) that bugs in the software may cause data loss. That's the chance you take when running a Beta version of any software.

Second, Backing up your data is always your responsibility. Rick could add in some backup routines into the program to copy files, but that takes away from fixing the other bugs that are discovered in other areas of the program. No matter how much backup functionality is added to the program, if you don't back up your own files, you will eventually lose your data, either through accidental deletion, or hardware issues( hard disk crash, corruption, et.)

Mike

Mike,

No arguments that this is in Beta. I understand that things happen during beta - unexpected....

Yes, backing is also my responsibility, but I'm sorry, it is surely not massive coding to prompt the user with an "idiot response" like many programs do, prior to exiting the program, "Would you like to back-up your data now?" causing it to save the data based upon a Y/N answer. This would allow the user to decide whether or not to clutter up their disk with this extra data. I have several programs that even offer one step more and allow me to save the file as a name provided by me, so that I may save my file to a different location and different name, adding a timestamp.

I wanted to point out that the fact the system TOTALLY overwrites the data rather than appending data when the program stops recognizing data already learned is serious enough to change the capture and retention of data learned already, especially during a failure of the software. Some examples of programs that do that, that I've used in the past, include P96Com, ATCSMon and MDTMon.

It's easy to say I need to back everything up myself, but that doesn't solve the problem that Unitrunker completely wipes out all of the learned data, causing data to still be lost. It wouldn't matter that I had a back-up copy, I could only start from the point where I last backed-up, the data since the back-up date is still lost. My experience tells me that the software could be modified to retain, with minimal loss of data, rather than a total loss.

This is not meant to be disrepectful to anyone,

Thanks for listening,

John
SE of Tucson

[amusement]

I've been using Unitrunker for about two weeks. When I enabled logging it loggs about a meg per hour. I was fooling around and changed to another trunking system ... my previous log entry for that day was still intact.

Is it possible that your PC is suffering from degrag issues or worst?

Also, the logging software starts and ends for each day creating new files.

Where there any events reported in the windows event viewer?
Is there enough space on your hard drive (don't mean to insult)?
Where's another process running at the time Unitrunker failed?
Is it possible (again don't mean to insult) that there is a virus or worm on the PC?

Please do a quick check through this list and report back. Regards ~ Jim

[FLANO]

Originally Posted by amusement

I've been using Unitrunker for about two weeks. When I enabled logging it loggs about a meg per hour. I was fooling around and changed to another trunking system ... my previous log entry for that day was still intact.

Is it possible that your PC is suffering from degrag issues or worst?

Also, the logging software starts and ends for each day creating new files.

Where there any events reported in the windows event viewer?
Is there enough space on your hard drive (don't mean to insult)?
Where's another process running at the time Unitrunker failed?
Is it possible (again don't mean to insult) that there is a virus or worm on the PC?

Please do a quick check through this list and report back. Regards ~ Jim

Hi Jim,
I have not enabled logging, for just that reason it takes up so much space. I have been relying on the fact that the RID, GID, HZ and other files all contain data, each containing a date and/or time stamp already associated with individual data learned. These are the files that I am referring to, that were overwritten. From my perspective, I'm not logging, but identifying, and labeling, each RID and GID that is captured by Unitrunker.

I regularly defrag my computer.

Currently, the drive where the data is, has over 2gb of storage space still available. Since the data files take up no more than 120kb collectively for each system that I'm monitoring, this shouldn't be a problem, and no insult taken

There were no events reported by the program or by XP. Upon return home last night, I noticed that everything that I use to know about the system was gone, and some of the known TG's "started anew" with a 13 April time stamp. The same thing happened to the individual Radio ID's. None of the RID's or TG's contained any of the data that I had already labeled, because the files were overwritten, not appended to. I am using XP-PRO.

I am not running anything else. I run Unitrunker daily on my computer, all day and night long, with a few breaks in between on some days so that I can run my other program, ATCSMon. At the time, Unitrunker was the sole program running.

No viral problems here either, checked that too.

As I mentioned before, I love what this program can do. It must surely be obvious, since I run it so much on my computer, and previous messages supporting this program I just want to strongly encourage the fact that to lose data, unneccessarily, just because the user didn't do a manual back up, takes away from an otherwise excellent program - an action not required of the user, on other data decoding programs.

BTW, I am running Unitrunker now. I've got to rebuild

John
SE of Tucson

p.s. Off to work, so it will be this evening late, before I can further respond. Thanx

[Unitrunker]

Originally Posted by FLANO

I've been monitoring a mutli-site TRS, for which I had collected a significant amount of data on during the past months. Today, when I came home from work, Unitrunker must have lost the signal for some time and COMPLETELY overwrote and wiped out all of the learned data from the past months...no backup :< I experienced this routinely on the first beta, especially if I changed from one TRS to another. But this wasn't the case today, it was the same TRS with existing data.

Thanks John. I've made progress in this area - just trying to get to the point where I have something that warrants the confidence of another release. So that everyone understands ... here's the problem. When the program identifies a system - it attempts to load any existing data for that system. It also saves any previously accumulated data. Somewhere there's a logic hole where an empty system is created and saved (empty data replaces good data). I've found and fixed some situations where this occurs but I'm certain there's at least one hole remaining.

I know this subject was addressed in earlier posts, but there has to be some fail safe built into the program to back-up data that already exists before overwriting the data. Some of the information that I recovered is lost until an event presents itself again. VERY, VERY frustrating...

Understood. I feel your pain. The program's logic is entirely impartial in this respect. It will just as gladly eat my data too (and does).

At the very least, do not allow the program to overwrite a file, when data exists already, IF the system thinks it has to start over again with a TRS. I know it's easier said than done, but to just arbitrarily wipe out data is not good business either...

That's the crux of the problem. The existing logic can be paraphrased as ...

if (system has changed) then
{
save-existing-system;
clear-memory;
load-new-system;
}

One way to implement what you suggest might be ...

if (system has changed) then
{
back-up-existing-system-files;
save-existing-system;
clear-memory;
load-new-system;
}

If the program fails to load the data, it's likely that it would fail to make a backup of those same files. While Mike's reponse is dead-on, I think John's point is that this has been going on long enough to warrant some sort of band-aid. I'll see what I can do. On a related note, I'm cleaning up the problem where an RR DB download replaces the user's own hand-edited alpha tags. More on this and other fixes later.

Originally Posted by amusement

I've been using Unitrunker for about two weeks. When I enabled logging it loggs about a meg per hour. I was fooling around and changed to another trunking system ... my previous log entry for that day was still intact.

As John mentions - this problem does not affect logging - it's accumulation of site and system data (like all those hand-edited alpha tags) that is getting eaten.

-rick

[amusement]

Thanks rick for the education.

[FLANO]

Thank you Rick, I thought I might have been going crazy

Thanks to everyone who also had an interest in this...

John
SE of Tucson

[DaveNF2G]

Rick's hard work and responsiveness are deeply appreciated by all of us testers. I run beta software to test the software. My critical research is done using more stable applications (unless there isn't one). I still use the various flavors of DOS Trunker for anything important. Unitrunker has the potential to replace several other programs. I'm sure we'd all like to be assured that we can rely on it before switching over completely, so this wide beta process is a great idea, IMO.