Sadly the time has come.....

[familydar]

When I feel I must retire my old FH software.

It's served me well over the years, and fair flies when compared with more recent offerings with all the extra features that I have no use for.  But periodically my main file decides it has become corrupt, for no apparent reason (but I suspect I just have too many people in it!).  When I monitor it daily it behaves itself, take my eye off the ball and it happens again.  Earlier in the year it happened and I had about 3 weeks worth of updates to reapply to a backup version.  Today I find it's done it again, and my March end of month backup is corrupt too.  Could be a month's worth to put right this time (I last created a clean copy on 10th March).

The plan today was a bit of gardening and taking up curtains, instead I'll be sitting on my posterior staring at a screen 

Jane :-)

[Zaphod99]

I spent most of my career telling people two things. Back up every half hour, and test your backups. I cannot remember all the times I've sat next to chief financial officers, almost in tears because they spent all morning working on something and lost the lot, or even worse, needing a backup and finding it didn't work.

Almost every software product, and I mean not just specifically family history software, has an option for you to start a new file, and import a backup. If your data isn't important then you don't need to test it.  That's what I used to say to the financial officers, is your data important? They'd look at me in disbelief that I'd even ask the question.

It takes a couple of seconds to click on file, save as, and put today's date, current time, and the word backup. It will take you half an hour to redo what it took you half an hour to do this morning, if you don't have a backup.

Mrs Zaph

[familydar]

Yes Mrs Zaph I know.  After the first time I meticulously took a backup at the end of every day, as you say it takes very little time, but I got bored when it seemed to behaving itself!

I think I may have got away with it (just) without needing to do too much re-keying.  I tried importing my old file into a more recent version of the same product and it told me to compact my file and try again.  So I did that (took a long time, did a bit of weeding in the garden while I was waiting!) and have now successfully imported it with no nasty errors.  I've created a ged using the new software and imported that into RM for their "problem search".  It's found a few, possibly one of them might be the root cause of the corruption but I'm not taking any chances, I'll correct them in the new software and bid a fond farewell to the old.

Jane :-)