Migration from 8.5 to 9.0

[Smitty1e]

Hello,
I've got a situation with an old Win95 box hosting PowerChurch8.5, which has been used for Contributions.
Desire is to retire this hardware and consolidate all modules on a Vista box running PC9.0.
The 9.0 installation balks at restoring from 8.5 files, and we're worried about over-writing other data besides the Contributions.
The 9.0 version will not install on the Win95 box, as a means of moving data forward.
The various contribution exports from 8.5 did not seem conducive to bringing out the data.
I have significant IT experience, so if I could get some advice on which files are important and how to do extract data, I'd be ready to proceed.
Thanks,
Chris

[Zorak]

After installing v9, the first time that you started it up, it asked if you were upgrading from a prior version of PowerChurch Plus. At this point, you should choose Yes and then point to the installation of version 8.5. PowerChurch Plus will then copy everything over and convert it into the proper formats for version 10.

To reset this, you should delete the whole installation of v9 from the Vista machine and reinstall. It is important to delete the files, rather than just uninstalling, because we leave a copy of the data files behind after uninstalling.

[NeilZ]

Um ... I think that Zorak may have missed something.

From what I gather you only used the Win95 box to do contributions entry? If so, did it have its own set of Membership data?? That is, mailing list and personal data profiles ??

If so, what was the 9.0 system used for ?? If you had mailing list and personal profiles entered on both boxes, I would hesitate trying to merge the data by hand, or forcing the data.

There have been table changes, to both the membership and contributions area, so any such conversion can cause major problems.

If you could outline exactly what was kept on each box, there may be a very easy way to do what you want to do. For instance, if membership and contributions were only entered on the Win95 box, and accounting only on the Vista box, the process is fairly straightforward.

[Smitty1e]

Um ... I think that Zorak may have missed something.

From what I gather you only used the Win95 box to do contributions entry? If so, did it have its own set of Membership data?? That is, mailing list and personal data profiles ??

That is the case, yes.

If so, what was the 9.0 system used for ?? If you had mailing list and personal profiles entered on both boxes, I would hesitate trying to merge the data by hand, or forcing the data.

There have been table changes, to both the membership and contributions area, so any such conversion can cause major problems.

If you could outline exactly what was kept on each box, there may be a very easy way to do what you want to do. For instance, if membership and contributions were only entered on the Win95 box, and accounting only on the Vista box, the process is fairly straightforward.

The 9.0 system is used to manage attendance, and track visitors to our church. Thus, it has a larger set of names than the smaller 8.5 set of names on the Win95 box (which has fought good fight, run good race, etc.).

So it seems that we're going to need to export the profiles from both machines to, say, .xls, and do a human-driven merge to a 9.0-suitable format, and then re-import.

I saw what looked like an interface for ad-hoc querying on the 8.5 box, but I've got no dBase-fu. Can you advise?

Thanks,
Chris

[Jeff]

If the 8.5 version did noting but contributions, you could do the following:

Run an envelope numbers list report in contributions in version 8.5.

You will need to update the version 9 membership information to where it matches all the envelope numbers assigned in version 8.5. When you are done the envelope numbers list from version 9 should match the envelope numbers list from version 8.5.

Once they agree you will need to update the version 8.5 to version 9. Then make an contributions backup and restore that backup to the version 9 with the complete memberhip information.

[Zorak]

I apologize for not going into enough detail in my initial response, but as everyone else has filled in the blanks for me, as far as helping you figure out which bits of data are located in which installation.

Once that is complete, to be able to combine this information into one installation, you can follow the instructions that I originally posted to convert your version 8.5 data into an installation of version 9. As you mentioned in your original post, you can't restore a version 8.5 backup into version 9.

[Smitty1e]

If the 8.5 version did noting but contributions, you could do the following:

Run an envelope numbers list report in contributions in version 8.5.

You will need to update the version 9 membership information to where it matches all the envelope numbers assigned in version 8.5. When you are done the envelope numbers list from version 9 should match the envelope numbers list from version 8.5.

Once they agree you will need to update the version 8.5 to version 9. Then make an contributions backup and restore that backup to the version 9 with the complete memberhip information.