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I Lost My Logbook and I Feel Fine
24 February 2022 | by Late last year I applied an operating system update to my Macbook and my solid state hard drive peed all over itself. Long story short, I was unable to boot from the drive or read it and I had to start all over with a different hard drive and a fresh OS installation. I was able to recover all my files from the cloud except a recent backup of my logbook. It appears backups of my logbook, which MacLogger DX apparently stored in a hidden directory not in the Documents folder, was not being backed up to the cloud. The last logbook backup I can locate is from 2015.
But honestly, I don’t care. I’m declaring logbook bankruptcy and starting over. I already have some plaques on the wall for DXCC and WAS. I’m not in any race or competition. I’m not contributing any more to the radio art if I’ve made 10,000 QSOs rather than 500.
It’s a new day, and a fresh new logbook. It’s rather refreshing.
This article originally appeared on Radio Artisan.
7 Responses to “I Lost My Logbook and I Feel Fine”
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Good morning Anthony, I was there too just a short time ago but was able to recover the log from cloud storage. As you say it is what it is and time to move on.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Can you pull your logs back down from LOTW/qrz/clublog/etc?
Hi Anthony,
What an insightful post! Back a few decades ago (right after the floppy disk age), a “huge” hard drive died without a recoverable backup (see aforementioned floppy disks). It had most of my teaching materials on it, about mid-career as a college professor. I had to start over.
It was a great boon to my class preparation, instructional organization, and, to be honest, my soul. I later won the Alumni Association’s highest teaching award which I don’t think I would have had not this “tragic event” happened.
Starting over can be a wonderful thing!
73,
Frank
K4FMH
Lost all my logs from when I was a VE8. Computer glitch and I had failed to set up a working back up. Oh well, lesson learned – need to check the backup occasionally to see if it is even there.
I gave up on paper logging, and kept all of my logs on qrz.com. I can access my logs from any computer, and I think QRZ does a darned good job. If my hard drive were to crash, all I need to is log into QRZ from any computer and I am back in business.
Some observations from a retired IT manager FWIW:
Assume always that it is *NEVER* “if” a failure will occur, rather only a matter of “when.”
As already noted, backup isn’t worth anything without recovery. Testing backup/recovery is very easy: use a bit-by-bit comparison program for a copy of the recovered file (to a different place) against the original. That’s saved me professionally and personally several times. Would you want to tell your CFO boss that you lost the master payroll files for a large hospital? Or your spouse that there are no family photos since you went digital?
As commented earlier, cheapest and easiest off-site backup is LotW in addition to whatever “normal” is chosen: external USB storage, cloud, etc. I have my logging program do this automatically so I can’t forget.
Another potential gotcha: some operating systems don’t backup open files. That means if your email or logging program is active, those files are skipped. And backup in the middle of the night doesn’t work when the system is turned off.
Each year, I do the starting-over-again-challenge by setting my logging program to only report the current year’s totals.
GL es gud DX!
PAPER!! Then you don’t have to worry about hard drive crashes and such. I haven’t see my paper logbook in DECADES!