Most of us translators realize that one of the worst things that could happen to our businesses is a hardware failure, theft, or other event that wipes out all our data. We’ve all been told, “Back everything up, because you never know.” We know we need backups for our business security and our own peace of mind. Some of us are even paranoid enough to have both a physical backup and a cloud backup (of any data not too sensitive for one).¹

I’m not a perfect person (ask my family), so when my computer’s hard drive died recently, I didn’t have everything backed up, but I had the essentials: my term bases, my translation memories, my personal photos, my financial records… However, when I got a new hard drive, reinstalled all my programs, and attempted to restore everything, I hit a couple of snags.

Quicken data? Fine. MemoQ resources/projects? Fine, if you know where to put everything. TO3000 Version 10? Tears of blood.

So here’s what I learned about backing up and restoring those records… Because it is a whole world of not-fun to be missing them at tax time.

There are two separate issues that make backing up and restoring your TO3000 Version 10 resources challenging. First, you need to know exactly what to back up, and it turns out I didn’t.

To keep your database, your program tweaks, your invoice templates, etc., ideally you’ll back up two different locations, and which data is stored in which may not be intuitive to figure out. By which I mean, I was supremely ignorant and only backed up one location. Luckily, the other one was intact on my busted hard drive. Here are the (Windows 7 64-bit versions of the) file paths where your precious data is stored:

Location 1) C:\Users\Public\Documents

Yeah, I didn’t expect the default save location for your stuff to be in the Public Documents folder instead of your individual user’s My Documents folder, either. It makes no sense to me to store client records in a public location, but that’s the way it is. If you use Windows 7 (and maybe Vista?), you may be in danger if you only backup your user’s documents, because the way Libraries work on this OS, it’s easy to not notice when something is actually in Public Documents instead of My Documents.

Location 2) C:\Program Files (x86)\AIT

Hopefully you won’t need anything from here! But inexplicably, a few of my backups got saved here but not in Location 2. The admin folder is also here in case something goes really, really wrong. Not that anything would go wrong when restoring files from a dying hard drive… Yeah…

The second issue is that Version 11 came out a few weeks ago. Why is this an issue? Because of the way Version 10 now checks for updates.

I had backed up my installation file of TO3000 v10 as well, so I installed it on the new hard drive from there. When I tried to load my database, it rejected me in no uncertain terms. Errors everywhere: You don’t have permission to load from this folder! Okay, I gave myself permission. Your database is the wrong version for this program! Fix it! Your program is the wrong version for this database! Update everything! …Uh-oh. At the moment, you cannot update v10. When you click “update,” it will not give you the latest build of v10. It will only give you the v11 trial version.

My installer was for build 1045. The latest build is 1049. Since I always applied the v10 updates when they came out, my database was apparently configured for 1049 and incompatible with 1045. There are tools available to update the databases: if my database had been 1045 and the program 1049, that would have been no problem. But the program itself can’t be updated from earlier builds to 1049 anymore, and only the 1049 program can read the 1049 databases and backups.

Now, perhaps if I had simply purchased v11 and imported my v10 database, everything would have been fine. According to AIT, v11 can read v10 files. But I am not comfortable with spending money for the privilege of finding out if my database is usable, or with risking that some kind of conversion error would happen during the upgrade before I finished this year’s taxes. (I’ll admit I was also just frustrated that I couldn’t update v10, which I paid for and should be able to update, and that made me stubbornly dig in my heels.)

If you want to stick with v10, though, at the moment there is only one solution to this problem: you need a TO3000 v10 installer file that matches or is higher than your current build. That means that if you’ve ever installed any updates, ever, you should probably just get a Build 1049 installer right now and tuck it away someplace safe in case of need.

The good thing is that AIT has a very nice customer service staff that always responds to my help tickets. When I submitted a ticket explaining that I couldn’t update from Build 1045, they wrote me back with a download link to Build 1049:

Dear Sarah Lindholm,

Thank you for your letter.

We have noticed that you have an old TO3000 build – 1045, while the latest one is 1049. We would like to suggest you to update your TO3000 copy to the latest build. For this, please download the setup file using the following link: http://download.to3000.com/SetupTO3000V10.exe , run it and install TO3000 over the existing copy without uninstalling it. During the installation process, please choose the ‘Do not install database’ option.

Just in case, please make a reserve copy of your database file before this process.

Please let us know whether the problem is solved or still persists.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
[name]

Once you have the right installer and you’ve backed up all the files you need, hopefully nothing bad will ever happen to your computer anyway. But if you do ever need to restore v10, AIT has a simple and helpful article on how to do it: How can I migrate TO3000 to another computer? It works like a charm!

¹Why a cloud backup, you ask? Because the thieves robbing your home will steal not just your computer, but your external hard drive too. True story. So if you’re all-physical, I suggest at least keeping the physical backup in a very different location from your computer.