That was it, went through it wit a fine brush to revert to the backup version I had, first time using nano editor so that slowed me down somewhat too, but now I’m back in business!
I’m so grateful thanks a lot!
I was actually chasing a different issue -duplicate entities in the history page- and saw a post suggesting to edit the file manually, I decided to try my hand at editing by adding a friendly name to a device… which I now know was a stupid idea! 
The fact those files were hidden should’ve been a good giveaway I shouldn’t have been playing around with them lol
As I said I’m back up and running now.
Happy new year everyone!