DSDPlus Suddenly Wiped And Rewritten DSDPlus.RADIOS file?!

[adamfancher]

First off, shame on me for not making frequent backups of my valuable data....that being said...

A rather extensive activity log complete with hundreds of alpha tags (and countless hours of my time) disappeared suddenly. I noticed when I fired up DSDPlus today, all of the talkgroups and their aliases were still there but none of the Radios had aliases. I opened my DSDPlus.RADIOS file and to my horror, everything was gone. A bunch of empty talkgroups with no aliases or logged activity, almost as if the file were deleted and regenerated.

A devastating loss that due to my own negligence I can't recover....however, it would be nice to know if I should expect this in the future?

Has anyone else experienced the sudden clobbering of their DSD+ radio data?

 

[ScanRite]

Yes, I've had it happen several times. The first time it happened, luckily, I had a backup on my laptop. I made myself an app to backup regularly.

 

[Reconrider]

*Goes to dsd on both computers to quickly make backups*

 

[adamfancher]

Good to know it's not just me.

Fortunately I always have two backups, one on the Radio ID Wiki, and one in the spreadsheet I use to update the Wiki.

Obviously I'll have to manually export in the correct CSV format which is a pain in the dick but I suppose not as bad as no backups at all.

Lesson learned, I'll have to remember to keep regular backups of everything in the root folder for DSD+, who knows what could go next....talkgroups, sites, networks....

 

[racingfan360]

I think we have all made this mistake at some stage, be it with DSD+ or something similar. No amount of swearing seems to bring it back either....I speak from experience on that.

Increasingly I am shifting more of my things to OneDrive with its inherent history/backups when any changes are made locally. Sure, it won't be to everyone's taste but it's saved me a lot of work on many an occasion.

 

[AM909]

Lesson learned, I'll have to remember to keep regular backups of everything in the root folder for DSD+, ...

This reminded me of something – sorry if it's obvious. In setting up the SDR# community edition, which I think included the free DSD+, and then adding DSD+FL, there's a lot of confusion about directories that can result in more than one set of DSD+ files. Are you sure your files are where you think they are, and you're not just looking at another set created by DSD+ in a different place, maybe from starting a different install of it or having a different current directory when doing so?

 

[adamfancher]

I'm using the standalone DSD+ Fastlane, was too complicated to try and work it into SDR# for me

 

[polkaroo]

DSDPlus rewrites the .event, .group and .radio files fairly frequently. And if something mid-write, you'll lose a chunk of that file, usually not noticed until it's too late because. I have a horrible habit of leaving my laptop on without plugging it in as I go in and out of my car fairly frequently so sometimes the laptop battery dies before I remember to plug it in.

This seems to be exacerbated if you use non-configurable two-way sync software like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. as the sync app locks the file it's syncing while DSDPlus also tries to write to it. Results in lots of frustration with corrupted logs. I've lost countless days/weeks of logs as I launch DSDPlus with a shortcut and generally until I update the software, I don't open the application folder to notice some log files are much smaller than expected.

I suppose all this is the cost for having human-readable text files. It's fairly easy to use until you get into hundreds of systems logged and if you're travelling around listening to various systems, I found it gets quite unwieldy trying to keep things tidy and in sync. Not sure how to solve this problem unless DSDPlus uses a real database, or a separate GUI app to manage the records.

 

[adamfancher]

DSDPlus rewrites the .event, .group and .radio files fairly frequently. And if something mid-write, you'll lose a chunk of that file, usually not noticed until it's too late because. I have a horrible habit of leaving my laptop on without plugging it in as I go in and out of my car fairly frequently so sometimes the laptop battery dies before I remember to plug it in.

This seems to be exacerbated if you use non-configurable two-way sync software like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. as the sync app locks the file it's syncing while DSDPlus also tries to write to it. Results in lots of frustration with corrupted logs. I've lost countless days/weeks of logs as I launch DSDPlus with a shortcut and generally until I update the software, I don't open the application folder to notice some log files are much smaller than expected.

I suppose all this is the cost for having human-readable text files. It's fairly easy to use until you get into hundreds of systems logged and if you're travelling around listening to various systems, I found it gets quite unwieldy trying to keep things tidy and in sync. Not sure how to solve this problem unless DSDPlus uses a real database, or a separate GUI app to manage the records.

Great info, thanks!

 

[racingfan360]

Perhaps a simple .bat file run from Windows Task Scheduler at a frequency of your choosing might be a better answer. You might choose to run daily and set robocopy to set the destination folder structure with a datestamp if you needed to access the history/build it up over time. Even if you decide to make the destination location / file names the same for each copy, something like OneDrive will still maintain an archive of the previous 25 versions.

 

[AM909]

Since the problem occurs when DSD+ is run, I'd put the backup in a batch file used to start DSD+. It could also warn you after DSD+ closes if the file sizes are outside a range that you periodically update as they grow, so you know ASAP that there is a problem and can pull back in the most recent backup, merging any necessary changes from the most recent session. I use an old tool called WinDiff for file comparisons.

The files are relatively small compared to storage space of most environments, so you probably don't have to worry about managing the backup files much. Maybe purging them each month and keeping the last one, just in case you ever need to go back and find the history of some system.

 

[Reconrider]

Perhaps a simple .bat file run from Windows Task Scheduler at a frequency of your choosing might be a better answer. You might choose to run daily and set robocopy to set the destination folder structure with a datestamp if you needed to access the history/build it up over time. Even if you decide to make the destination location / file names the same for each copy, something like OneDrive will still maintain an archive of the previous 25 versions.

You would have to first stop any DSD windows, then do the backup then lastly start dsd back up again. Wouldn't be hard

 

[AM909]

... set robocopy to set the destination folder structure ...

I forgot we've got RoboCopy as part of Windows now. A trip through it's help files should yield, or at least inspire, a solution.

 

[adamfancher]

This is turning into a royal pain in the ass. DSD+ uses a flavor of CSV but with multiple delimiters (comma and a varying number of spaces/tabs) and while I seem to have the ability to import it into a spreadsheet, recreating the format is proving next to impossible. I don't know how I'm going to pull this off

 

[hrh17]

I used indesign with data merge to rebuild and export mine

 

[adamfancher]

I used indesign with data merge to rebuild and export mine

Thanks for the recommendation....I got the free trial and have located the data merge but am a bit stuck.

I've created a mock CSV file of the dsdplus.RADIOS file and formatted out the colons due to a "not well formed" error, so it at least accepted the CSV as a data source. Maybe it's just the learning curve of indesign but I'm like a deer in the headlights on how to proceed.

Any details you remember on the process you don't mind sharing would be awesome.

Thanks!

 

[slicerwizard]

This is turning into a royal pain in the ass. DSD+ uses a flavor of CSV but with multiple delimiters (comma and a varying number of spaces/tabs) and while I seem to have the ability to import it into a spreadsheet, recreating the format is proving next to impossible. I don't know how I'm going to pull this off

I've never seen tabs in any of the data files and I've never worried about how many spaces I used to line up fields, so are you sure there are "multiple delimiters"?

 

[adamfancher]

I believe so, when importing into Excel, DSDPlus.RADIOS requires merged delimiters for comma and tab to display correctly.

I did try exporting with just commas for delimiters, as well as a comma with a space, DSDPlus didn't like either.

Since all the columns line up, I'm thinking what they used was a combination of fixed width with comma seperation.

In any case, it's easy enough to just export as comma-delimited and use Find & Replace in a text editor for most of the columns. I think I'm going to have to just bite the bullet and manually line up the hit counter and Radio ID, which, unlike the other fields vary in width.

Just for reference, my file is in the format:
P25,(7 spaces)BEE00.3A9,(Space)51,(9 spaces)1801373,(4 spaces)50,(2 Spaces)Normal,(7 Spaces)6,(2 spaces)2021/11/17 6:20,(2 spaces)"Trooper #1289 (Mobile)"

 

[adamfancher]

OK, back in business.

After exporting my spreadsheet in Unicode comma-delimited CSV, I followed the following steps:

1) Align protocol, network, and talkgroup

Find 'P25,BEE00.3A9,TALKGROUP,'
Replace With 'P25, (7 spaces)BEE00.3A9(Space), TALKGROUP,(9 Spaces)'

2) Align priority and override
Find '50,Normal,'
Replace with '(4 Spaces)50, Normal,(7 Spaces)'

3) Align Date
Find ',202'
Replace with ',(2 Spaces)202'

4) Manually align hit counters

Single digit values are already aligned. Double digits must be moved over one space, triple digits two spaces.

5) Remove excessive quotation marks
Find '"(2 Spaces)"'
Replace with '(1 space)'

Find '"""'
Replace with '"'

 

[slicerwizard]

I did try exporting with just commas for delimiters, as well as a comma with a space, DSDPlus didn't like either.

I just stripped a radio line down to this and no problems reported by DSD+ 2.368:

P25,BEE00.3C2,-1,52204,10,Normal,479,2022/01/03 16:33,"DAS Robot"

No need for padding spaces. Copy/paste that into your .radios file...