Not Able to Backup

[Brian Burkhart]

We run v 10 and recently moved the entire program to "dropbox.com" and deleted it from our church computer. It seemed to work good from there but wouldn't do pictures in the pictorial directory report. We copied and pasted the entire PowerChurch folder back to our church computer from dropbox, and the pictures work again, but we are getting some other error messages on startup. We thought of backing up our data and reinstalling the program, but at neither location, the church or dropbox, will it let us use the backup feature (the error message says that file pclayout.dbf does not exist). My main question is whether we're going to loose all our data if we reinstall the software on our church computer, in other words do I have to backup and restore, or will the reinstallation automatically import the old data? Also, does anyone else have experience in running PowerChurch from dropbox?

Thanks!
Brian

[NeilZ]

We run v 10 and recently moved the entire program to "dropbox.com" and deleted it from our church computer. It seemed to work good from there but wouldn't do pictures in the pictorial directory report. We copied and pasted the entire PowerChurch folder back to our church computer from dropbox, and the pictures work again, but we are getting some other error messages on startup. We thought of backing up our data and reinstalling the program, but at neither location, the church or dropbox, will it let us use the backup feature (the error message says that file pclayout.dbf does not exist). My main question is whether we're going to loose all our data if we reinstall the software on our church computer, in other words do I have to backup and restore, or will the reinstallation automatically import the old data? Also, does anyone else have experience in running PowerChurch from dropbox?

Thanks!
Brian

I do not believe that Powerchurch can be run from such a site, as it looks like its primariy for backup storage, and file sharing. Powerchurch needs much more than that.

However, there is Powerchurch Online, which provides a virtual terminal service where you can run Powerchurch from the Powerchurch servers. The setup for this is very specific on the Server end, this is more like running via Citrix. There is a monthly fee attached to that.

Now to your issue. If you have an existing backup, that is a backup created in Powerchurch before you moved and then deleted the program, you can install the program and then restore that backup to the program.

Now if you added data to the program while it was located on this Dropbox.com server, that data will be lost. However, there is a way around this.

What I would do if you can is do a backup of the Powerchurch directory on the remote server. Make sure all the files in the Powerchurch directory and all its subdirectories are included.

Restore that backup to a local computer, make sure that the directory tree is properly created:

That is:

C:\PowerChurch\PCPLUS10

and the subdirectories are loaded under the PCPLUS10 directory.

Then do a normal install of the program, the program will overwrite the files in the directories, but should not overwrite the data (I'm 99% sure on this point). I would then also install the last Maintenance Release for version 10 dated 7/14/2009.

Then startup the program, I fully expect that everything should run fine.

Come back and let us know.

[Brian Burkhart]

It worked! Thanks so much for your help!

[NeilZ]

It worked! Thanks so much for your help!

You're welcome.