restoring lost mt4 chart data - page 2

[William Roeder]

Previously answered

[kst4rs]

Slightly different scenario for me:

After restarting my PC and MT4, 90% of my charts lost my markings and defaulted to EURUSD and the green bar charts on black background...

Any thoughts on how I can (if at all possible) recover?  

Thanks

[pips4life]

To  answer to this thread's initial question, how to restore lost MT4 (ALL) chart(s), the only way I know of is to manually "Save as" a profile name *before* you might accidentally crash MT4!!
When you save your profile, all the newly created and moved objects are saved as they are.

I have a few solutions, but first, 2 questions of my own:

From within an MT4 indicator or script program...

Q: Is there any way to retrieve the name of the current profile?   It is obviously there at the bottom right edge of the MT4 session, but I know of no way to retrieve it.

Q: Is there any way to trigger a "Save" of the *current* profile?   (If I could get the current name, I could put together the keystrokes to "Save As" of the name, if I know it; see below).

If anyone has an answer to these, it opens up additional possibilities.

Solution A:

The MT4 "File" menu has a "Profile" sub-menu with the first 3 choices:   Next (Ctrl+F5, Previous (Shift+F5), Save_As (no bindkey).  Notice the built-in bindkeys!

Therefore, the easiest strokes would be  Ctrl+F5 (which goes to the Next profile, so ideally that would be a blank one so it's fast), then do Shift+F5 to go back to your original (which will take some time, a bit like restarting MT4).

To surround your main profile with blank ones, you have to work with the list-of-profiles which is alphabetized *after* you create new ones and restart MT4.

Create these 3 profiles:

My Profile KEEP BLANK   (space between My and Profile)   (It's optional to create this)

MyProfile   (no space)

My_Profile KEEP BLANK  (underscore between My and Profile)  (It's optional to create this)

Restart MT4 before experimenting with the bindkeys.

Use the "MyProfile" for your regular work.   Use EITHER of the Ctrl+F3 then Shift+F5, or vice-versa, to change to an adjacent profile and switch back to "MyProfile".

You are not required to create the two adjacent "KEEP BLANK" profiles, but it will be faster to switch to a blank profile and then back to your own.

Solution B:

I happen to use programmable keyboard devices (Logitech), which makes the following easy to do, but there are also some software solutions to define macros  (Do a search for "programmable bindkey software"; but I don't use them).

I can program a series of keyboard keystrokes that do the "Save As" to a specific name of the profile: 

(You can do these same strokes manually just to test the idea, but clearly it must be programmed to be of practical use)

Sequentially type (without the () comments) :  Alt   F (for File menu) downArrow  downArrow  downArrow  rightArrow  (to descend into Profile menu)  A (for Save As)  MyProfile  Enter 

Optional:  Add one more 'Enter' at the very end to automatically answer 'Yes' to the "Overwrite?" 'MyProfile' question.   (It's probably safer to not use a 2nd final Enter).

First, create "MyProfile".  After that, it becomes trivial to hit the programmed bindkey to save your "MyProfile" again, and hit Enter (for "Yes") if asked to "Overwrite?".    If you left off the final 2nd "Enter", then you'll manually answer the "Overwrite?" question yourself.

Also note that if you open a different profile, when you use this same bindkey it will overwrite "MyProfile" with the one you were active with (and then "MyProfile" becomes the active one).

Solution C:

Before doing anything risky which might crash your MT4 session, first quit MT4 (which saves your current profile), then restart it.   At least you won't lose your recent charts and edits.

Solution D ?

If anyone knows of answers to my first 2 questions, it would open up additional possibilities.