InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by WayneK on 2021/02/05 09:36

I've lost all my settings (tabs, toolbars, colors, options settings etc). Is there any way to recover these and what can I do to prevent this in the future?

I have 116m installed version.

Last night my computer became unstable in a way I've never seen before. Screen was blacking out and coming back on and no programs would respond. Eventually had to just turn it off.

When I re-started again this morning, all my old settings were replaced with generic default ones.

I think what might have happened is that the welcome file got launched somehow (I see it in the list of recent files). When the computer finally locked up, it got tagged as the "last closed", which I think makes its settings apply to all future file openings.

Really hope this is recoverable.

Wayne

edit: One thing I can do for the future is take screen caps of my toolbars and option settings.

Comments

I think I give up. Could not find anything to help in the user manual or google searching. It's going to take less time to just start over from scratch and try to re-create everything.

I still would like to know how to protect myself from losing all my toolbars and options settings in the future.

Wayne

I'm just guessing, but perhaps the issue is the options.ini and settings.ini files.

I see files with these names in two places.

One place is . ...\InfoQube\AppData, but from the file dates, these seem to be just the .ini files from the initial installation.

I also see them in ... InfoQube\Users\MySelf\.
The dates of the ini files here, as well as their size, show they have been modified. So I think these are the ones with one's modifications.

Someone who knows more than I do might say if these are the proper .ini files, or whether there are more relevant ini files elsewhere.

Well, looking further at this, maybe some of the *.Dat files may also be relevant.

About the same thing happened to me about two weeks back. I think it's suboptimal that this custom data is stored under the program folder which users might not back up regularly or at all. I'd be much in favour of placing a copies of user setting files under the data folder but not sure if that makes sense to anyone else. Sorry for you loss, Wayne. However, I discovered some perviously useful settings in options I hadn't seen before so there was some good in it after all.

Yeah, if I had to do it over again I would have just built it from scratch again rather than waste time trying to find the original settings.

I, too, found some improvements just from having to go through all the settings again.

One oddity: I had mentioned before that the black grid lines are actually gray and hard to see. Now they're black, just like I wanted, even though I did not do an update.

A low-tech "back-up" by screen capping the toolbars and options is still a good idea, I think.

Wayne

I'm using the non-portable version. Switched over a long time ago because I was having a similar problem (was losing my toolbars in updates). It didn't have anything to do with InfoQube. I just kept messing up the update procedure so I switched to something where I didn't have to worry about it.

Wayne

[quote=WayneK]

One oddity: I had mentioned before that the black grid lines are actually gray and hard to see. Now they're black, just like I wanted, even though I did not do an update.

[/quote]

The gray lines are an artifact of using the System Enhanced scaling (in Options). As they say, you can't have your cake an eat it... either high quality text OR black lines

It's part of the list of things I'm waiting on the grid supplier for a fix.

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

I'm on a phone now, but wondering is it possible some of you had the non-portable version of IQ installed?

As a portable app, it has to save settings in the same folder as the exe.

Some programmes allow the user to save settings in a custom location -- maybe that could be a solution.

Hi Wayne,

Sorry to hear about this.

Tools > Help > Support gives you the path where user files are saved

Detailed information can be found here: InfoQube Program Install and Set-up, section 10

As Tom pointed out, using the portable flavor makes it easier to create backup as the user settings are a folder under the main program

You could use a file search tool, like the excellent UltraSearch to find all instances of the file menu.dat, perhaps other ones are closer to the last used one.

As to how it could happen, I have no idea. The process for toolbars is

Look in the user folder. If not found, create a new one using the Windows login (unless IQ is started using the /user:xxx command line switch)
In the user folder, look for file menu.dat, if not found copy the system provided one

This applies to toolbars and options settings. For opened tabs and colors, these are saved inside the IQBase

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Thanks, Pierre. It had nothing to do with InfoQube. I lost settings in a couple of other programs, too. I suspect my motherboard is going bad, but not sure.

Wayne