Some of My Data is Missing - Part II

[Gary W. Dick]

I too use a Custom field - Location - to identify where my books are.  I converted to 2020 Professional from 2017 back in early January. I've just discovered that I have 930 books where the Location field did not convert.  Many are arbitrary books in the middle of long runs that I would have no problem finding or just re-identifying, however, there are lots of others - spread out over 34 boxes - for which I have no clue.  It would appear at this point my only option to is re-install 2017 (with my saved DB) to get the location field back for the missing books, then re-install 2020 (to the current DB with all the additions I've since made) and add the fields manually. Unless some has a better suggestion?

[Steven L. Dasinger]

If it helps, you can have CB 2017 and CB 2020 both installed at the same time. You can even run them at the same time.

However, if you reinstall CB 2020, it will uninstall CB 2017.

[Mark J. Castaneda]

If you go to the Setup Menu>Columns to View; is that custom field checked to be visible so you see that data on screen?

[Fred Slota]

I believe that he is describing data missing from some (930) of his books, and not all (at 34 boxes, we're talking many thousands).  I don't believe he's describing a hidden column, where he would be unable to see the Location information for all of his books, but rather the selective omission of the Location information from a portion of his collection.

[Mark J. Castaneda]

Hey Gary,

One case like this happened before with another user. he discovered by accident he converted over the wrong database. Just to be sure its not the case with you, Programming team is curious to know the following:

-reinstall CB2017, load in your old db (in the cba format), verify that db has that box location data in the custom field

-load/convert that db over again in CB2020; does that data show up?

 

[Gary W. Dick]

Mark - I'm hoping to be able to get to that this weekend.  From your earlier post I was going to re-install 2017 and run the two programs at the same time.  My DBs have always been in the default location so I'm pretty confident something happened during the conversion - I've a number of books I track, and I know exactly where they are.  It was just by chance I noticed the empty field.

I've already made a number of additions under 2020 but I'll attempt the conversion again and let you know what happens. 

 

[Gary W. Dick]

Mark - I'm back to normal - although there were a couple of issues.  Here's what I did.

Uninstall CB 2020.

Ran cCleaner and cleaned up the Registry.

Re-install CB 2017. Verified everything was good, then did a rebuild lists for pretty much everything and verified all good again.

Re-install CB 2020. Went normally, but when I opened 2020 it didn't convert the old DB - just gave me an empty one.

File/Open on the 2017 DB and it converted.  Took longer than the first time.

I actually have three custom fields.  Custom Field 1 (Location) converted OK with all data.  Custom Check 1 and Custom Field 2 did not covert to the names I had given them, but the data within these fields did convert.  I reassigned the names and all is good.

One other thing unrelated to the above: Backups within Setup/Preferences does not work very well.  I do my backups to a removable hard drive and I only run them if there's been a DB change. Two issues: 1) I can't turn them off.  2) Where the backup goes varies. Sometimes it goes to the external hard drive, sometimes it ignores the setting and goes to the comicbase directory on the C:\ drive.  When it does that, I have to reset the Preference to the external drive.

[Steven L. Dasinger]

Gary, of your two issues, #1 may be possible depending on what you mean and how you want to use it.

If you press and hold the Alt key when you exit CB, it will not make a backup. You just have to hold it long enough for CB to completely close.

This doesn't change any settings and you have to do it each time you exit CB and don't want to make a backup.

[Mark J. Castaneda]

is your removable drive always plugged in before you start up the software?

Also, i've seen some computers reassign plug-in drives with a different drive letter; if that's the case with you that could be the trouble because the backup path that was set before isn't matching up.

[Gary W. Dick]

Yes - my drive is good. But today I learned about the ALT key when exiting - that works and is better than what I did before.

[William Steel]

I had the same problem except I was using 3 custom check boxes, 4 custom fields and one custom date field. Only the custom check boxes retained any information. So I am switching back to the 2017 Archive edition until I can get a couple of days off to try and fix this. But if there's Gary's problem, John Pelszynski's problem as well as mine, maybe there's a bug?

[Gary W. Dick]

Yeah - something's not right. I've only got two custom fields and one custom check and they've all gone back to their default names; i.e. "Location" has reverted to  Custom Field One.  No data loss (as far as I can tell). I opened my first backup as a working file and same thing.  So it would appear that assigning names to a custom field is not something that is saved and the field is not protected in any way. . . .

[Gary W. Dick]

OK - after reviewing the problem William linked above - I found the issue - .ini files are somehow corrupted.  The selections are there, but they're not being read.

I renamed settings and preferences .ini and restarted ComicBase.  Settings.ini was recreated, Preferences.ini was not. From there I renamed the fields and everything is back. Up higher I noted how my preference for backup location sometimes disappears. This is still happening even after I just did this so there appears to be an issue with how these files are handled. In my case preferences.ini does not appear to be used.

One other note:  In Windows 10, the AppData folder is a hidden file. Because, you, know, Microsoft.

If anyone else is having this issue and wants to take a stab at it, I've attached a PDF showing what I did.

ComicBase ini Files.pdf

[Troy E. Charlton]

Just wanted to chime in on this issue as well, as I discovered last night I also had lost data within custom field #1, same field that Gary is using to track location/box.

I only noticed it while doing some basic reporting reviews, and seen that some of the issues had my location field missing or blank.

My installation of Comicbase 2020 was on a fresh Windows 10 install, with a copy of the 2017 database used as the imported data.

I lost approximately 300-400 entries (from a 10,000+ collection), random issues, in random boxes there didn't seem to be a pattern for the ones that went m.i.a.

Fortunately I still had an older copy of my database, under a previous version of Comicbase for reference.

I was able to use it to look up each book, and re-key the missing data....but it was extremely time consuming.

I just figured it was 'growing pains' with the new version.