Selectively lost settings changes on power failure

Here in the privatized utilities, third world state of Georgia, USA, in the Atlanta suburbs, power outages are frequent. Installing and setting up a sampleset seems to be a favorite time for these events.

Today I installed Peterborough after having uninstalled and cleared settings a while ago. Then I closed all the toolbars, added some mini control panels, autodetected keyboards and expression pedals, and set scoped and registrations on my pistons. A little over an hour.

I saved after each small group of changes every few minutes, at least 20 File | Save operations. Including right after changing the control panels near the start, and of course at the end.

After playing the organ for about 15 minutes, the power blipped and the PC rebooted. Here's the odd part to me: The toolbars were back to their defaults, the mini control panels were gone (i.e. my earliest saved changes were wiped out), but my MIDI assignments and registrations were still there.

Are those categories of settings saved to different files, and Windows didn't flush both to disk after the many saves? Is there a way to force Windows to sync unwritten disk buffers to disk? I can't eject the C: drive to make the writes go out.

I've lost all the settings on newly installed organs with power failures several times, so it would be good to know how to get the changes to stable storage.

Thanks.

P.S. I use File | Save after every settings change routinely when I'm playing and adjust something, because power outages lose stuff. I wish that menu item could be assigned to a piston.

Found a partial answer. In Device Manager, Disk Drives, Properties, Policy, one can turn off write caching to the C: drive. Whether that might cause other problems is a question for another day, but I seem to be able to get away with fairly heavy disk I/O while using Hauptwerk except at its most demanding.

[mdyde]

Hello Mark,

Mini control panel positions/states and MIDI settings for virtual organ controls all get saved into the organ's (one) settings file. However, I've had a look and in Hauptwerk v4-v8 control panel positions/states only get queried from Qt when the organ unloads, so using "File | Save any unsaved setting changes" may not explicitly have forced those to be saved at that point in time, whereas ideally it would, and I've now made it do so for the next Hauptwerk major version.

Edit: P.S. To force control panel positions to be saved straight away (which would also save all other per-organ settings) you could reload the current (=last) organ (e.g. Ctrl+F4).

I'll try that. Thank you!

Assigned a piston to "Organ: Last used" to reload the organ.

If my electric power supply would be so unstable, I would use an UPS like this:

https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/BK500 ... 7590290410

Thanks, Thomas. I'll look into that!