Reading, Backing Up & Restoring

Summary: Reading your current programming in for review, the two different kinds of backup Squawker PC creates, and how to restore one.

Read from Scanner

This pulls whatever’s currently on your scanner’s SD card into the editor. It’s a full replacement, not a merge – whatever was already in the editor is cleared first, with no “you’ll lose unsaved changes” warning beforehand, so save or back up anything you want to keep before reading. As covered in Overview & Getting Connected, any trunked systems on the scanner are silently left out of what gets read in.

Two Kinds of Backup

Squawker PC creates backups in two different ways, and it’s worth knowing which is which:

• Save (manual) backs up whatever is currently in the editor – which may or may not match what’s actually on your scanner right now, especially if you’ve made edits or just did a Read that dropped trunked systems.
• Auto backup before sending (the checkbox next to Save, on by default) works differently: right before a write, it copies the actual files off your scanner’s SD card exactly as they are, before anything is changed. Because it’s a raw copy of what was really on the card, this is the one backup that does preserve trunked systems, if you had any. If this automatic backup itself fails, programming is stopped rather than continuing without a safety net.

Either way, give your backup a name (or let Squawker PC generate a timestamped one) – if a backup with that name already exists, you’ll be asked whether to overwrite it.

Restoring, Deleting & Managing Backups

Every backup you’ve made appears in the Existing Backups list with Restore and Delete buttons alongside it. Restoring asks you to confirm, then replaces everything currently in the editor with that backup’s contents. Open Folder takes you straight to where backups are stored on disk.

One thing worth knowing: this backup list isn’t filtered by which scanner or profile you’re currently working with – if you use Squawker PC to program more than one SDS100/SDS200/UBCD3600XLT scanner from the same PC, all of their backups appear together in one shared list, so check the name and date carefully before restoring.

Your Editor Session Is Also Saved Automatically

Separately from backups, whatever you’ve built up in the editor is saved automatically when you close the Programmer window, and reloaded automatically when you reopen it for the same profile – so closing and reopening picks up exactly where you left off, even without making a formal backup.