Need for periodical backups ..... yet again ..... please

[Happy Harry]

Hello Gary and Mark

I have asked for this over many years and it is still not possible and when the Internet, or Betfair, or Windows, or BA fall over I am screwed. The reason for that is that BA locks the spreadsheets so until I close BA I can not periodically save them and if BA or Windows or Excel or the Betfair API has crashed I am screwed.

Today something failed. I actually think that Betfair had an issue and the reason I think that is that I got an error late afternoon telling me they had an issue when I was looking at balances. Be that as it may.

Later though BA/Windows/Excel, who knows what fell over and as a result I can pull the bets from Betfair. And match them by value but that is a very painful process.

Can I once again request that BA either does not lock the spreadsheets in which case I can periodically save them by either including a macro or using an external script or that BA includes a periodic save function. Please. Because recovering hundreds of bets by matching them is an aweful way of recovering what has happened during the day.

I am not trying to blame what the problem that caused BA/Windows/Betfair API to crash. But I am blaming BA for not allowing me to periodically save the sheets, or BA to have that function built in and it has been a long standing problem. Even a periodic save of the locked sheets to another directory at least would save things up to the crash.

What do you think? And I have asked before.

Thanks.

[Happy Harry]

Gary and Mark

another wild thought that might be a huge improvement from the current problem.

How about a streaming text file that records every bet including which spreadsheet it came from and the outcome. So sort of like the current standard spreadsheets do anyway but updates every result. Would need a date field as well but essentially replicates at a macro level what BA does already.

The problem is that if BA or Windows or Betfair unrecoverably crash everything is lost because BA locks the sheets.

Robert

[GaryRussell]

I will add an option to specify a folder where it records the bets including which workbook and worksheet they are from automatically sometime this week.

I'm not sure how Betting Assistant can irrevocably lock Excel. Have you tried killing the Betting Assistant.exe process in the task manager when this happens? If you do this and Excel is frozen then the problem could be coming from your workbook and Betting Assistant is stuck for this reason.

[GaryRussell]

Please install Version 1.3.2.8g

This version has an additional option in Preferences|Files to enter a folder name to store the back ups. They are in .csv format. You can also set a number of days to keep them after which it will delete older files.

Screenshot_Excel_results_folder.png (80.63 KiB) Viewed 1781 times

[Happy Harry]

CashBack2nd7Nov2024.JPG (231.63 KiB) Viewed 1479 times

Hello Gary

Thanks for that. I have been away for a bit and not updated and been bitten big time today. Here is a screen shot of what happened when trying to close out today and while I can recover from this it is a mongrel of a process to do so. This is the results situation for all 8 sheets of interest today. Some hundreds of bets and for sure not saying that it is a Gruss problem but recovering the missing information for the day is an aweful experience. Does not happen often but when it does it really hurts.

HH

[Happy Harry]

So trying literally all options I can think of nothing I does will recover the missing bet information. What is interesting is that if I clear filled in fields then they come back with the same Bet reference information and same "RESULT_NOT_AVAILABLE" result but no data.

This implies, correctly that the bet was placed. The information is in the API but the data is not coming back or not being loaded into the spreadsheet.

I wonder why.

I will leave all the sheets open until the morning and see if anything improves overnight.

HH

[Happy Harry]

And here is a screenshot taken some 48 mins later for exactly the same spreadsheet. I did try it again some 30 mins ago but no different.

So the problem is Betfair it seems.

[Happy Harry]

Back to the periodical backups.

Thank you very much. That works very well so in practical terms while the site might go down or something might crash any valid data that is there can now be recovered. That was not the case previously where while there was an option to restore previous results that only worked where the program had been legitimately shutdown exactly as the information says. So a crash and no dice.

Love it.

Many thanks.

[GaryRussell]

I'm glad it helps. When you get the chance can you update to Version 1.3.2.8h as there is an issue in reporting results for partially matched bets.

[Happy Harry]

Thanks. I have known about that issue for a long time and assumed that because it is coming from betfair where the result in the sheets are not correct when it has been partially matched that it was not solvable. I have been pulling the detail results totals for each day where the totals dont match to find the problem(s) and then manually correcting them in my results database.