User Support Forum

I've upgraded our version 8 to 8.5 for our Treasurer. I went to make an accounting information backup on her new notebook computer and it is asking for me to put a disk in a drive that doesn't exist. Is there a way for me to designate a drive letter to Backup/Restore a file? I'd like to have her get away form 3.5 inch floppies, but that's all PCH seems to want. I'd like to send the file to a CD-RW.

In version 8.5 you can backup to a CDR drive, your CD drive should be listed in the drop down of drive letters. One thing to note, the backup will work with CDR drives, but will not work with DVDR drives.

I believe she has a DVD R/W drive that will take CD R/W data discs as well. Maybe that's the problem. When I use a TEAC external floppy, it finds it ok. When I unplug it, a drive letter comes up for a drive that isn't designated; like F:, and there is no F: drive on the computer. I tried a portable USB 8 gig flash drive as well, and it was the same thing. Guesswe'll have to use the floppy and back it up to CD for now. Thanks for the assist.

The drive .F. designation that you are seeing means "False", as in we aren't finding any drives that are able to be backed up to.

If a drive has DVD distinction, we won't be able to back up to it, even if it can write CDRs.

ok. Thanks for the help. I understand the F: drive phenomenon now.

I understand the version 8.5 phenomenon. In the meantime, I have version 10 on my notebook and when I slipped a 210 MB pre-formatted CD-RW into the DVD-RW it backed up data just fine. Was that a rarity, or a feature with Version 10?

Did you use the "folder" option to browse to the disc?

Is it formatted in a way that you can write files to the CD without a CD burning program?

No. I simply went to Utilities/Backup/Accounting Files/ and then the drives appeared. There was no pre-configuring or folder hunting. The CD did not require a burning program.

I just discovered this thread when searching for an answer to a problem backing up files in Power Church V9 on our new office Vista computer. This computer has an internal DVD burner for a drive, and that will write to CD-R disks from Windows, but when trying to backup to CD-R disks from the PowerChurch program, the Dynazip program does not give the drive letter as an option to use to write to. For restoring from CD-R disks, however, it does offer the drive letter to read from. If this is happening just because it is a DVD burner, is there going to be an MR that will correct this since more and more new computers are coming out with DVD burners, or will we have to add a CD burner to this computer just to be able to backup to CD-R's?

If you need to backup to that DVD drive, you'll need to update to version 10.4. We added a feature to 10.4 that will allow you to backup to DVD and DVD combo drives.

Is it possible to use a USB thumb drive for PCH backups in version 9 or is a floppy or CD burner the only choice?

Jim

I've been using a 2gb Sandisk Cruzer flash drive with no problems. I believe there have been posts about other brands of flash drives that did not work because they were not seen by the system as "removable drives".