E-logs And Paper Logs

I've gone through this very scenario twice now. If your qualcomm is completely down you call dispatch and give them the fax number of the next truck stop you are going to shut down at (this information is readily available to you if you have one of those truck stop guides on the truck with you, and in my opinion every driver should have one of these, I use it many times each day) and they will fax you the last eight days of your logs. You keep paper logs while it's down and of course turn in your logs with your trip packs or transflos.

I would not recommend that you ever keep both paper and electronic logs at the same time, because if you get stopped by the right D.O.T. officer you will have a ticket on your hands for having two sets of logs going in your truck.

They would ticket you for having two sets of logs even if both logs show the exact same data? Really??

I would not recommend that you ever keep both paper and electronic logs at the same time, because if you get stopped by the right D.O.T. officer you will have a ticket on your hands for having two sets of logs going in your truck.

If the two sets didn't match, indeed so. In that scenario it would be safer to store them on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer then. DOT isn't going to go through your hard drives.

If your qualcomm is completely down you call dispatch and give them the fax number of the next truck stop you are going to shut down at and they will fax you the last eight days of your logs.

....and you drive along trying not to have a complete nervous breakdown knowing that you have absolutely no logbook records on you at all at this point.

We were just talking about this kind of thing in another thread and I was saying that from time to time everyone knowingly breaks laws out there because sometimes you get in a spot where you have no other reasonable option. This would be one of em. If your Qualcomm quit and you have no backup logs you just have to hope and pray that everything goes well between now and when you arrive at the next fax machine.

They would ticket you for having two sets of logs even if both logs show the exact same data? Really??

That's a good question. I don't think so. If they matched perfectly and you explained that one was a backup set to the other it might fly. I don't know the technicalities though.

Another thing you can do is get one of the 10 million logbook apps for your phone, tablet, or desktop and duplicate your elogs in there. That way if the elog system goes down you have your own copy.

Funny you say that.... I just put an app on my phone to do logs. I have a long drive to school. (22 hours) I will have to make a few stops because I have some paperwork and other things to attend to. I have plenty of time to get to school so I was going to try and trip plan it and run the logs just like I would as if I were driving. Hopefully, it will help my novice understanding of the logs improve. Hopefully, all the studying I have done with the High Road training program on here, I will shine in school. Thanks guys and gals.

But if the entire system goes down and they either can't access your logs or get them to you anytime soon then there needs to be a plan B.

I would assume the elog company will have a customer service telephone number for "Plan B". You let them know DOT is stairing at you and you need a copy immediately. If their system is also down then we better check for a terroist attack by an electromagnetic pulse, or the apocalypse has begun.

These posts have been informative. Thank you all. Mark

We have elog system called xata, one time after a 14 hour layover it said I had zero drive hours left. I called my dispatch and it was working again in five minutes. If I have to take a rental truck for some reason they print out my last 8 days on paper. In orientation I was told they can always fax the last 8 days.

~Reconstruct his/her logs for the current day and the previous 7 days, less any days for which the driver has records

Which of course nobody could do from memory alone so you'd have to have some other way of remembering the previous 7 days logs.

Yes Brett there is a chance that entire logging systems can fail but you have to realize that once you input a action into the log it goes into the main companies database. In this case Qual com or People Net and it's backed up right when you do the status change. These companies have redundant Systems on top of redundant systems to make sure they do not loose the info they are being paid to keep track of.

Now if your unit in the truck goes down and it can happen your company can access your logs on the net to the parent log company and fax you the copies you need and then you just copy them onto the paper logs in your truck.

From what I have been told from tech support at Qualcom that they would have to have a complete crash of the system and 2 different backups that are on completely different networks of their even though all 3 systems are on a active read write status. The chances of all three systems crashing would be pretty small.

Ummmmm, how do you get a fax when you are sitting on the side of the road with a DOT inspector?

The D.O.T. officer will give you the fax number of the nearest chicken coop and they will look it over and confer with him concerning it, but you will find that most of the time when a D.O.T. officer finds out that you are using e-logs that he will just not even take a look at your logs. They usually don't even want to bother with it. In ten months of driving I have been stopped or checked at weigh stations approximately 6 times, and only one out of those times did the officer go ahead and look at my logs once he found out that I was on e-logs.