Custom Upgrade For Technicians

This topic explains ways to optimize the upgrade process if you are upgrading very large databases.

Collect! copies your entire Collect! contents to its upgrade folder prior to upgrading, excluding help, snapshots, backup and other irrelevant folders. This process ensures the integrity of your original Collect! system and it is the preferred upgrade method. However, the copy process may take quite a while if you have a very large database.

Alternatively, you can prepare the upgrade folder yourself by moving or extracting the complete contents of a Collect! folder into the \bin\upgrade folder.

When Collect! attempts to autodetect an existing Collect! installation, it will first look in the bin\upgrade folder. When upgrading from there, the disk space check and initial copy operation will not occur. This means that you are responsible for ensuring that you have enough space on your computer for the upgrade process and running the new Collect! after the upgrade.

Please refer to Help topic, Hardware Requirements for system specifications.

WARNING: When you upgrade Collect! Version 11.2 or Version 11.3 databases, the structure of the database becomes changed with the upgrade. For this degree of upgrade, any previous methods of cut/ paste of the original database folder are no longer valid because the schema will be changed. We cannot emphasize strongly enough that prior to starting this level of upgrade, you MUST ensure you have a full backup taken the night before to ensure that you have rollback ability if needed. Should the upgrade process fail to complete for any reason, you will not be able restore function by moving a cut/paste of the original files back into the original folder.

CV8 and CV10 databases are not modified by the process since they still rely on exporting the data and reimporting it. The only thing that is removed is the version.dat file from the data folder so that Collect! will not autodetect it again when it is restarted.

Preparing The Upgrade Folder

To ensure that no files are being held by the operating system, reboot your server.

Install Collect! Version 11.6 on your computer. Create a sub-folder named upgrade in the "CV116\bin" directory.

Copy the entire contents of your Collect! folder into the upgrade folder.

Collect! needs your total Collect! directory in the upgrade folder - all its contents - NOT the folder itself. For example, NOT "upgrade\cv8" or "upgrade\cv11" but instead "upgrade\data" or "upgrade\masterdb" and so on.

Upgrade Folder Contents for Upgrading

Performing The Upgrade

From here on, the upgrade procedure is exactly the same as the steps in the upgrade topic for your Collect! version. Collect! simply detects the database to upgrade in the cv116\bin\upgrade folder, rather than by searching the drives on your computer. Please refer to Help topic, Upgrading your Collect! for the relevant topic for your Collect! version.

Troubleshooting

If the upgrade process does not complete successfully, Collect! will display a message.

Upgrade Not Successful

Please review the _upgradelog.txt in the cv116\bin folder for details.

The main reason for failure is due to copying an incomplete Collect! folder into the upgrade folder. All the relevant files must be present. Make sure that the upgrade folder has all the contents of your Collect! folder, except for help, tutorials, backup folders, snapshots and so forth.

If you are not sure, please request assistance from Collect! Technical Services. Your data drives your business!

CV8 Upgrade Error

You may see a particular error message if you have failed to copy the entire contents of the cv8 folder into the upgrade folder.

CV8 Upgrade Error

However, failure can occur without an error message like this. Instead, Collect! will display a generic message.

Upgrade Not Successful

Please review the _upgradelog.txt in the cv116\bin folder for details.

Summary

Collect! is able to perform the entire upgrade procedure with very little intervention on your part. However, if you have a large database, and you find the copy procedure unacceptable, Collect! gives you the option of preparing the upgrade folder yourself instead of letting Collect! perform the copy procedure.

This is only for large databases and should only be done with expert technical assistance. You should have a safe backup stored separately from the database you have moved into the upgrade folder.

Create an upgrade folder if it does not exist. make sure it is empty to start. To prepare the upgrade folder yourself, move all the contents of your Collect! folder into the upgrade folder. Or extract a complete backup into the upgrade folder. Remember, you must include all the contents, not just the databases as the upgrade procedure needs to utilize other utilities contained in the other folders, like DLL files, for instance.

WARNING: When you upgrade Collect! Version 11.2 or Version 11.3 databases, the structure of the database becomes changed with the upgrade. For this degree of upgrade, any previous methods of cut/paste of the original database folder are no longer valid because the schema will be changed. We cannot emphasize strongly enough that prior to starting this level of upgrade, you MUST ensure you have a full backup before you proceed to ensure that you have rollback ability if needed. This can be done the night before or the morning of, if you are doing it over a weekend or other business hour holiday. Should the upgrade process fail to complete for any reason, you will not be able restore function by moving a cut/paste of the original files back into the original folder.

CV8 and CV10 databases are not modified by the process since they still rely on exporting the data and reimporting it. The only thing that is removed is the version.dat file from the data folder so that Collect! will not autodetect it again when it is restarted.

See Also

- Upgrading Your Collect!