PGdebt technical bulletin 15

Consolidating client files stored on several PCs to the same location
Sometimes it is required to consolidate several groups of client files which are saved in various locations and move them all to the same storage location. This may be needed if a PC is scrapped, or when PCs which were standalone are now linked in a network.
PGdebt clients each have their own file and these files are stored in a folder called the data folder. Standalone PCs have their data files stored locally...i.e. the data folder is on the local PC. Networks keep all files in one place, on one particular PC which is often the server, but wherever it is, it will be the data folder and will be accessed over the network by all PCs.

PGdebt client data files all have the extension .pga or .pgd

All that is necessary is to locate the data files on the old PC, and move them to data folder on the destination PC. To do this you need to know the names of the data folder on the old and the new destination PC.

The data folder is usually called C:\pgdebt7\data on a standalone PC. It may be PGdebt5 or pgdebt5 depending on how PGdebt has progressed and been upgraded on your PC. If you do not know the name of the data folder, you can find this from the Options/Supervisor/Files-Paths page in PGdebt.

Moving the client files
PGdebt clients each have their own file, and these are stored in the data directory/folder. If you do not know what this is go to Options/supervisor/files-paths and note the name of the folder. Your client files are in this.
Take a new floppy

  1. Using Windows Explorer, find the data folder
  2. Copy (not move...!) the data files onto the new floppy. Data files have the extension .pga or .pgd. Generally all the files in this folder are required.
  3. If you cannot get them all onto one floppy, make two separate floppies with half each. One floppy will take several hundred files !
  4. Take these floppies to the new PC and copy the files off the floppy into the data folder...it is helpful if this has the same name as on the old PC but its not essential.
  5. Now you have moved you data files and the moving process is complete. PGdebt will run normally on the new PC.

Problems
Since these data files have been on separate PCs, it is possible that several of them may have the same name. e.g. SMITH.PGA may occur on two different PCs are refer to two different clients with similar names. In this case you will have to rename one of the offending files to SMITH 01.PGA or similar.

A further problem affects the statistics. Every PC has a special file to control the PGdebt statistics data and these control files should always be identical when you are using PGdebt on several PCs together which are not networked. PGdebt has a built in procedure for keeping these files the same called synchronising, and if separate PCs have been synchronised there will be no statistics problems. However if the synchronising has not been done it is possible that the control files may be different and this means that the statistics may have errors as files moved from one PC to another will not have been made using identical control files. There is little that can be done about this, it is too late to synchronise now, the damage has been done !   In some later versions of PGdebt you will be warned of this situation and an attempt will be made to correct the control file so that at least the problems will not continue.

Some errors, but not all, will be recognised by PGdebt, do not skip any warnings that say an unknown stats code has been found...check the stats at once and correct any errors.