# Help recovering my instance
**URL:** https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089
**Category:** General
**Created:** [9 July 2019 18:00 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089 "2019-07-09T18:00:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@biz](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/biz)
#### Post date: [9 July 2019 18:00 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089/1 "2019-07-09T18:00:59Z")
Sooooo long story short i killed my instance of node-red
I was using the schedex. I input the cordinates in WITH the W and the N in there. Clicked deploy and crashed my entire instance.
While I do have a backup from yesterday , How do I go about getting it back... literally all I need to do is remove the W and N from the one flow in the node of schedex.
While I am not overall in a panic I would like to save the work I have done from yesterday as I did a lot of work. PLUS I am going on vacation in 4 days and was going to setup extra security stuff ☹
Any suggestions?
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### Author:  [@bakman2](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/bakman2)
#### Post date: [9 July 2019 18:09 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089/2 "2019-07-09T18:09:59Z")
Start node red from the commandline
node-red —safe
It will start but the flows are stopped, fix the issue and deploy, flows restart.
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### Author:  [@biz](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/biz)
#### Post date: [9 July 2019 18:28 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089/3 "2019-07-09T18:28:39Z")
Thanks for that. This did help somewhat. I have been able to start it in safe mode and review my last change. Looking at the schedex node there is no N or W in it. For good measure I delete the entire node. I click deploy and it sits and spins and never recovers.
Via my vsphere monitor I can see the CPU spikes and maxes out until I kill the box again. I do a ctrl +c to try and exit node-red --safe and it just sits there.
Is there a way to locate in the files (whereever the flows are stored) the schedex? and remove it manually?
Edit: combing through the documentation - i found this Node-RED uses `flows_.json` as the default flows file. You can change this by providing the flow file name as argument to the `node-red`[command](https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/local#command-line-usage).
I will try and find the .json file
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### Author:  [@biz](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/biz)
#### Post date: [9 July 2019 18:52 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/help-recovering-my-instance/13089/4 "2019-07-09T18:52:55Z")
I have got it working . As suspected node-red or schedex wasn't able to display the N or W within the interface . Even if I removed the node and deployed I am guessing it would search for that and crash upon trying to remove it. I opened the json file manually and low and behold there was the schedex node with the N/W. i removed it and restarted. Now it all works great
Many thanks. Shall be reporting a bug to schedex guy on github as he should be sanitizing the input in the fields 🙂