Preparing To Upgrade Your Database

You are here because you want to upgrade your existing Collect! and you are ready to prepare the groundwork.

Before you attempt a major upgrade to a current shipping version, you need to confirm whether the hardware you want to run it on is sufficient to perform well with the higher resource requiring software. See the Help page " Hardware Requirements" first and plan accordingly.

Getting Your Databases Ready

There are a few important tasks to complete in preparing for the upgrade. The first three can be completed in any order before proceeding to the final step. Do not skip any step.

First, run a full internal maintenance on your existing database, ensuring that all options are switched ON.

To do this:

1. Sign into your working database in Exclusive mode as an Operator with user level 99.

2. Select File from the top menu bar and then select Maintenance from the drop-down choices.

3. When the Database Maintenance screen is displayed, select the CONFIGURE button and ensure that all options are switched ON with a check mark.

4. Select the RUN FUNCTION button to run the Maintenance.

5. Ensure that the process completes with no errors.

6. Due to financial changes that you might see, you must do a full RECALC of your database on the same day that you do your upgrade. This ensures that all financials are up to date.

7. Backup your entire Collect! folder that your current version is stored in, all folders and sub-folders.. Saving onto another drive with a different name (i.e. CV11_Old) or onto an proven, safe external device is recommended. This will dramatically speed up the time for rollback should there be any reason to restore your last working version, i.e. power outage during your upgrade.

WARNING: Do NOT use an incremental type backup as your pre-upgrade rollback safety net.

Incremental backups only write files which have changed since the last time you backed up your files. It can require access to months worth of backups to restore a system fully when this is the method of backup used. In addition to being extremely time consuming (down time for your office), there are often missing backups causing loss of data and file integrity.

8. Collect! parses your transaction types when updating your accounts. Please examine your list of transaction types prior to the upgrade and correct any transaction types that have duplicate code numbers. During the upgrade, Collect! will keep only the first instance of any transaction type and delete any others that share the same code number. This may produce unexpected results.

Collect! uses default transaction types for updating your financials. These transaction types are created automatically for you during the upgrade if they are not already in your database.

If you are already using any of the default transaction types in your database for other purposes, Collect! will renumber the transaction type and any transactions that use the code. Please refer to Help topic, Upgrade Financial Changes.

9. Plan your upgrade so that you have enough time to (a) complete it along with all the preliminary steps AND (b) enough time to restore from your backup in the event there is a reason to need to rollback.

If you are unsure of doing any of above-noted steps, please do not attempt to upgrade. Please ask your local technician to help you through the process, or coordinate with our office to assist. Technical Services can quote you a price to assist with the process as well as undertake to do the process for you. Pricing is determined by degree of upgrade, how current/fast is your hardware, how much of the upgrade are we doing, in what hours are we doing it. Please be advised that major manual upgrades must be done by appointment, not on demand, due to the preliminary steps, stages and time to complete.

Upgrading Multiple Databases

If you have more than one working database to upgrade, please prepare each database as described in the steps above. Make sure the necessary transaction types are in the database. Do a thorough maintenance on each database. On the day you intend to perform the upgrade, recalc all totals for each database, and then backup the database and store the copy safely.

See Also

- Introduction To Upgrading
- Upgrading Topics