A friendly reminder to make regular backups before experimenting with nightlies!

[Zach Rutledge]

I've been hesitant to check out the new nightly build because I have a large custom alias list for a local P25 system and I also share calls to Broadcastify for a few dozens talkgroups, but the allure of having NXDN decoding rolled into the app finally got the better of me.

I knew with it being a major change it was a wise idea to backup the sdrtrunk directory in full "just in case" and I had planned to do that… except my squirrel brain saw something shiny and got distracted and I wound up installing and running the nightly without making a copy of anything.

On the first run, everything worked fine, as you'd expect from this software. So I quit the app, unloaded DSD+ to free up my second SDR and then relaunched the nightly again. Still working!  Then I imported a local NXDN system into my existing playlist and added some aliases for it.  More success! This is working so smoothly!

Then for some reason I decided I needed to go back to the stable 0.6.1 version to check something out and that's when things went all akimbo.  Apparently adding NXDN data to the playlist xml file causes the stable version to just… overwrite the file and act like a new install.  Uh oh.

Also, this is about the time I realized I forgot to make a backup.

It's not totally a disaster; I did have some backups but they were 2 years old so the data was a bit outdated.  The P25 system I'm monitoring (AIRS in Baldwin County, Alabama) has added probably two dozen new talkgroups in that time.  I do have it all in a spreadsheet but it'll take some work to get everything back the way it was.  And of course I had to re-login to Broadcastify and re-add a hundred aliases to that.

I did also figure out I could just clone my main playlist file and add the NXDN to that second one for testing, but after all this the nightly decided it only wants to let me use one SDR at a time.  I can start either of my two dongles separately, but if I try to start both of them like I did before, the older model crashes out and is removed from the sdrtrunk list of available devices until I restart.

DSD+ still loads the other dongle just fine so for now I'm back to my split setup with the P25 on sdrtrunk and NXDN on DSD+ fastlane.

Next time I will make that backup first, lol.