This is now the 2nd or 3rd time in a month that TWS deletes ALL pages on the platform. I hope IB is listening and resolves this serious problem soon. At least they could tell the user, save "x" file and if it happens, fix it this way. I'm just sick of retyping all the symbols again! I have version 820.2 This time I'm wiping TWS from my computer and starting fresh to see what happens.
I believe you. It will make me very reluctant to upgrade from now on. As a matter of fact there is something seriously wrong with the way this latest build handles work pages. I just deleted TWS from my computer, reinstalled the latest version, wrote up 3-4 pages, always click "save settings" and restarted. Guess what?! The pages were gone! Again!
No problems with 820.2 here but what I've been doing lately is saving the entire C:\IBJts directory as a backup in case it happens. On a previous upgrade months ago it killed my settings so I rolled back a version and restored the backup and it was fine.
I loaded 820.2 over the past week on 3 machines. All were running a 6 month old version (810) as I am wary of new releases too. So far, no real problems. All my symbols were retained, however the toolbar reset itself to the original condition with all icons visible. I did absolutely nothing special with this upgrade, didn't save anything or copy any files or directories. My pages would have been pretty easy to rebuild. I am also running 3 different operating systems on these machines, Win2000, XP and ME. Not sure what your upgrade issue might be IndexTrader, but I hope this helps to nail it down and get it resolved. I have occassionally spoken to a very good techie at IB. Unfortunately, I don't recall his name or how I got transferred to him. With all the features and complexity of this software, there are certainly some very talented developers somewhere back there and I'm sure someone at IB would have an idea what the problem might be...as always, the key is getting to that person. Good Luck!!!
To be safe, keep a backup copy of all files in each account folder. Whenever TWS loses settings or pages, to restore, just copy all files from the backup. IB's TWS software is really quirky.
This just started happening to me. I have been using TWS for a little more than a year, but I was told on another forum that it has been an ongoing problem. Pages are stored in a file called "jts.pg". I noticed if you find a file with a name like "jts.Fri.pg", and rename it to "jts.pg", it puts your pages and setting the way they were on Friday (or whatever day you pick).
Same usual deletion just happened to me again. After trying your suggestion below, all pages were restored to last saved settings. Thanks very much, rwk!
I am still using TWS version 795.3 from June 2003. I do not upgrade unless there are new features added that I wish to take advantage of. I trade stocks and the older version works well for me. I have also had my settings deleted several times in the past and would rather not deal with that problem.
At some point you will have a problem as we can not guarantee backwards compatibility over such a long time frame. Note that the page settings are currently backed up on your disk automatically over a rolling 5 day period. By not upgrading you're also missing out on some good features on the front end which have been added over the past year such as: - local audit trail - book trader - Good after time orders - close position per page - new account window - etc More importantly, you might be missing out on some features on the backend which could affect your performance. If you are worried about upgrading, I suggest you backup your JTS directory and then do a download, if unhappy, you can easily roll back.