No worries. Arduino related handholding is one of the things this forum does very well indeed usually with a better signal to noise ratio than the official forum.
I should caution you: if you've *NEVER* done any C programming or programming in a structured, procedural high level language before, the learning curve will be quite steep.
If you go down the Arduino road, it may be worth considering a data logger shield
* which will give you a SD card socket and a RTC chip so the logger can run standalone without having to have a PC powered on. See
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-data-logger-shield/overviewData retrieval could be via the Arduino USB serial interface - send a plain text command to dump events since the last successful retrieval (or for a specified date time range) and get back text or binary data in whatever format you decide to code it to give you.
It is possible to put an Arduino on your LAN using the Ethernet shield and retrieve date from it over the network, but that's fairly advanced, even if you follow one of the 'cookbook' recipes for using that shield.
N.B. many of the shields use up a significant number of the 18 available I/Os (excluding UART RX & TX pins) on an Arduino Uno so if you've got a *LOT* of switches to monitor and don't want to use I/O expanders, take a look at the Arduino Mega 2560.
Another option for the logger that' s already been mentioned is the Raspberry Pi. Pi Zero models and all model A boards don't have on-board Ethernet or USB hub, but OTOH because they don't have the on-board hub chip, you can put the SoC in USB OTG device mode and connect directly to it via USB from your PC. The Pi Zero W is probably the best option for a simple logger, as its bluetooth and WiFi capabilities make it much easier to connect to. You *will* need to get it on your LAN to get it internet access to install and update software packages, and its a lot easier if you don't have to do that through a USB tether to your PC.
OTOH if you prefer wired Ethernet capabiity, get any of the B models, but the tradeoff is they cant be USB tethered to a PC as they don't support USB OTG.
None of the PIs have an on-board RTC, so you either need them to have network connectivity so they can get the time from a time server, or to add a RTC module. They all have a single SD card socket, which they boot the Linux OS from. You can log to a file on the SD card, but keep a spare exact copy of the card as SD cards that are frequently written to tend to go bad after a while. Also note that a Pi is *MUCH* more power hungry than an Arduino.
* Plug in daughter boards that match the Arduino pinout and form factor to extend its capabilities are called shields. The Raspberry Pi equivalent are called hats (though strictly speaking a standards compliant Pi hat must have an ID EEPROM, which not all boards impement).