Tool Bar Pain and Ways To Avoid it.

[HumbleChief]

I've read a couple of threads here about disappearing tool bars and/or quirky tool bar changes and didn't really understand the pain that can cause to one's work flow. I recently experimented with some tool palette tool bars and other way to get my tool bars a bit more functional and before I knew it ALL of the tool bars were messed up. Nothing where it was before. Nothing looked the same in any view. Tools missing. Tools gone. Loaded my custom tool bar, nothing changed. So very disturbing and I finally got all the hub bub around tool bars going missing. It was awful.

 

I was at a complete loss then I remembered that since I just installed a new hard drive that I had saved my old tool bar data from the previous install to a new directory on an old hard drive for backup. Went to the current Chief X13 data folder, deleted all the toolbar data, and copied the old tool bar data in to the new X13 data folder. Tool bars are back to normal and a huge sigh of relief.

 

I no longer trust Chief to not destroy my tool bars and have a back up tool bar file specifically set up in case that happens again. Might be good practice in general. Hope that helps.

[ACADuser]

A short explanation of how to back up the custom tool bars may help.

[Renerabbitt]

@HumbleChief and @ACADuser Chief automatically creates a backup file of your toolbars. Do not edit your existing toolbars, copy and edit the new. In the toolbars folder there are files with the extension named "bak" simply delete the modified toolbar you would like to revert, then delete the "bak " extension and your toolbar will be restored

[HumbleChief]

3 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

@HumbleChief and @ACADuser Chief automatically creates a backup file of your toolbars. Do not edit your existing toolbars, copy and edit the new. In the toolbars folder there are files with the extension named "bak" simply delete the modified toolbar you would like to revert, then delete the "bak " extension and your toolbar will be restored

...or not, and it's not worth the risk to me to rely on Chief to have a back up that 'restores' the old tool bars as it's just as likely that .bak back up tool bar could be a back up of the tool bar that's gone astray.

[HumbleChief]

3 hours ago, ACADuser said:

A short explanation of how to back up the custom tool bars may help.

Hey Alan, here's what I did when I installed a new hard drive and it worked to copy old hot keys and tool bars and templates from the previous install to the new install. Go to Documents/Chief Architect Premier X13 Data/ (or wherever your Chief Data is stored) and you'll see all of your current Hotkeys, Templates, Tool Bars etc. If you are happyy with your current tool bar(s) just copy the contents of the tool bar folder (or the folder itself) to a safe location. If (when?) your tool bars blow up you can restore using that older tool bar setting by deleting the current tool bars and copying the old files into that folder. I had backed up that older data folder and reset everything this way when I installed a new version of Chief.

[ACADuser]

Thanks Larry.

 

[HumbleChief]

3 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

@HumbleChief and @ACADuser Chief automatically creates a backup file of your toolbars. Do not edit your existing toolbars, copy and edit the new. In the toolbars folder there are files with the extension named "bak" simply delete the modified toolbar you would like to revert, then delete the "bak " extension and your toolbar will be restored

Hey Rene, ALWAYS appreciate your posts and information but I just looked in my toolbars folder and the only Larrys.toolbar.bak file was dated 2016. There is now a Larrys.toolbar and a Larrys_copy.toolbar . Do you think that copy version serves the same function as the older .bak files?

 

There's also a Larrys_copy.toolbar.bak dated June 2020. I thought the .bak files were updated as you suggest but I wonder if the _copy.toolbar has replaced that function?

[Kbird1]

If you proactively backup your Chief Data Folder ( as you should ) , you should always have a backup of the Toolbars Folder from the day or week before.

 

SyncBack Free is a great App for doing small (or large) Backups like this Daily to and another Drive Internal or external , been using it for yrs along with Macrium Reflect myself.

 

https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/index.html

 

M.

[HumbleChief]

9 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

If you proactively backup your Chief Data Folder ( as you should ) , you should always have a backup of the Toolbars Folder from the day or week before.

 

SyncBack Free is a great App for doing small (or large) Backups like this Daily to and another Drive Internal or external , been using it for yrs along with Macrium Reflect myself.

 

https://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/index.html

 

M.

Smart no doubt. I have never had a problem with toolbars until the other day and it was awful. Mick, I think your advice is better than mine. I'm going to look into backing up the data folder.

[Kbird1]

19 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

Smart no doubt. I have never had a problem with toolbars until the other day and it was awful. Mick, I think your advice is better than mine. I'm going to look into backing up the data folder.

 

Syncback works well for backing up Folders etc , I have used the free version for 10yrs+ is my guess , never upgraded to the Pro Version as the free version has the features I need eg to back up the Data Folder and My Client Folders.

 

M.

[HumbleChief]

15 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

 

Syncback works well for backing up Folders etc , I have used the free version for 10yrs+ is my guess , never upgraded to the Pro Version as the free version has the features I need eg to back up the Data Folder and My Client Folders.

 

M.

What/where do you back up to?

[Kbird1]

12 minutes ago, HumbleChief said:

What/where do you back up to?

 

I backup to another Folder on my internal 2TB HDD      AND    My External 4TB HDD

 

Data redundancy is best ie 2 places at least ( HDD's can Fail ) ... you can also create a Folder in the Cloud on G-Drive or Dropbox

or even the free OneDrive that a lot of people don't seem to use for anything else.... once setup and run the 1st time

it doesn't take long as only changes are backed up each day, so I start 1@ at 7pm , then 2@ 7.30 and 3@ 8pm each night.

 

Mick 

[HumbleChief]

22 minutes ago, Kbird1 said:

 

I backup to another Folder on my internal 2TB HDD      AND    My External 4TB HDD

 

Data redundancy is best ie 2 places at least ( HDD's can Fail ) ... you can also create a Folder in the Cloud on G-Drive or Dropbox

or even the free OneDrive that a lot of people don't seem to use for anything else.... once setup and run the 1st time

it doesn't take long as only changes are backed up each day, so I start 1@ at 7pm , then 2@ 7.30 and 3@ 8pm each night.

 

Mick 

THANKS

[Renerabbitt]

2 hours ago, HumbleChief said:

Hey Rene, ALWAYS appreciate your posts and information but I just looked in my toolbars folder and the only Larrys.toolbar.bak file was dated 2016. There is now a Larrys.toolbar and a Larrys_copy.toolbar . Do you think that copy version serves the same function as the older .bak files?

 

There's also a Larrys_copy.toolbar.bak dated June 2020. I thought the .bak files were updated as you suggest but I wonder if the _copy.toolbar has replaced that function?

You simply made a copy at some point, the bak file still serves as a backup. Was the creation date postdated or the update date which is standard i nan explorer window under the date column. 
regardless, workflow should always be that you copy a toolbar instead of trying to modify an existing one. That way you have a copy and the original file intact.

[Michael_Gia]

I really wish everyone would stop acting like there’s a solution or a fix. 
 

There isn’t, until Chief decides to fix this very irritating problem.  

Everything else is bullshit. 
 

I do a lot of sit-downs with clients, so if you think it’s frustrating and disruptive of workflow when you’re alone, imagine when it happens in front of your clients. 
 

The issue is related to when more than one monitors are used.  Especially when one monitor has a different resolution than the other. 
 

Chief should be ashamed of themselves at this point. It’s disgusting. 

[HumbleChief]

13 hours ago, Michael_Gia said:

I really wish everyone would stop acting like there’s a solution or a fix. 
 

There isn’t, until Chief decides to fix this very irritating problem.  

Everything else is bullshit. 
 

I do a lot of sit-downs with clients, so if you think it’s frustrating and disruptive of workflow when you’re alone, imagine when it happens in front of your clients. 
 

The issue is related to when more than one monitors are used.  Especially when one monitor has a different resolution than the other. 
 

Chief should be ashamed of themselves at this point. It’s disgusting. 

Some truth to this Michael. The tool bars should never relocate or reconfigure themselves out of nowhere. It's a simple fix to reload the old tool bars back to sanity but your point is well taken. We should not have to do so.

[HumbleChief]

14 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

You simply made a copy at some point, the bak file still serves as a backup. Was the creation date postdated or the update date which is standard i nan explorer window under the date column. 
regardless, workflow should always be that you copy a toolbar instead of trying to modify an existing one. That way you have a copy and the original file intact.

I think we're talking a bit of apples and oranges and yes one should always copy (darn near anything you want preserved) a tool bar set instead of modifying an existing one. The point I was trying to make in the previous post was that my toolbar.bak file was dated 2016. I would have thought there would have been a more recent .bak file but perhaps I didn't change anything for 5 years? It's not a concern, only an observation.

[Chrisb222]

23 hours ago, Michael_Gia said:

I really wish everyone would stop acting like there’s a solution or a fix. 
 

There isn’t, until Chief decides to fix this very irritating problem.  

Everything else is bullshit. 
 

I do a lot of sit-downs with clients, so if you think it’s frustrating and disruptive of workflow when you’re alone, imagine when it happens in front of your clients. 
 

The issue is related to when more than one monitors are used.  Especially when one monitor has a different resolution than the other. 
 

Chief should be ashamed of themselves at this point. It’s disgusting. 

 

This is a strong post but sometimes the truth hurts. You're right, Michael, this SHOULD NOT EVER happen and should be an EMERGENCY repair project for the developers.

 

I've been using personal computers for 35 years and NEVER had a toolbar go haywire, and never even KNEW there was such a thing as a toolbar file that I had to keep a "bak" copy of to repair when it did.

 

Michael, I've seen you take a lot of heat on the forum for your honesty, and I think that you getting a downvote for pointing out such a glaring problem is ridiculous. I gave you an upvote to counter.