Backup and Restore

[LaVerne]

...I have been backing up the contributions module periodically onto a flash drive. I always verify to make sure all is OK - and it has been.
...Now, I tried opening one of my backups in order to view and possibly make a copy of a contribution statement. When I click on it, I receive "invalid image" and am unable to open it.
...The wierd part to me is that info. is in zip files and go to Picasa which is a photo program.
...How do I place these files somewhere else where I can actually view the backups, or how do I unzip these files????

[NeilZ]

...I have been backing up the contributions module periodically onto a flash drive. I always verify to make sure all is OK - and it has been.
...Now, I tried opening one of my backups in order to view and possibly make a copy of a contribution statement. When I click on it, I receive "invalid image" and am unable to open it.
...The wierd part to me is that info. is in zip files and go to Picasa which is a photo program.
...How do I place these files somewhere else where I can actually view the backups, or how do I unzip these files????

FWIW .. it sounds like the file associations on your computer are messed up. You should be able to go into My Computer, find the file, right click, then select Extract all . If you don't get that choice on a zip file, then you have to fix those file associations. Unfortunately, that takes more instructions than we have room here. However, this link should help you out here: http://tinyurl.com/4t5ob74

You didn't mention what was giving you the 'invalid image' error. I'm assuming that its not Powerchurch, if so, what you may want to do is copy the file from the 'flash' drive, to a directory on the computer and try to restore from there.

Now, the only way you can open this file up for use as you'd like, would be to use the restore function of Powerchurch, and restore it into the program database; however definitely take a full backup of the entire database before doing this.

That said, as long as you haven't purged old Contributions from the database, you should be able to create the Contribution statement from standard reports.

[Zorak]

You didn't mention what was giving you the 'invalid image' error. I'm assuming that its not Powerchurch

Most likely, that would be a message from Picasa, which is specifically an image handling program. It doesn't know what to do with zip files.

File associations aside, there is no reason to open the PowerChurch Plus backup zip files. You will only see a copy of all the PowerChurch Plus data files in there. It will not give you any insight into when the backup was made or what transactions or members were in the database at that time.