Restore Backup Problems

[Bob]

My hard drive recently crashed. Lucky for me, I always
backed up my data to a floppy. UNLUCKY for me, when I
try to restore the back up, I get an error message that
says the file is either corrupted or not a Money backup
file.

There are three other files on the disc (all word .doc
files) and they open without any problems.

Anyone have this problem or know of a possible remedy. I
don't want to start all over again (3 years of data...)!

Help!

bobm

 

[Cal Learner-- MVP]

My hard drive recently crashed. Lucky for me, I always
backed up my data to a floppy. UNLUCKY for me, when I
try to restore the back up, I get an error message that
says the file is either corrupted or not a Money backup
file.

There are three other files on the disc (all word .doc
files) and they open without any problems.

Anyone have this problem or know of a possible remedy. I
don't want to start all over again (3 years of data...)!

First, write-protect the floppies with the little slider. Do *not*
consider solutions that want to make modifications directly to the
bad diskette.

I would copy each file from the backup floppies to the same
directory/folder. This will give you an extra backup of the good
floppy separate any problems of reading the floppy media from some
other potential problem.


The files will be named *d1.mbf, *d2.mbf, *d3.mbf.

Presumably you will fail when you try to copy one of the files.

You can try reading that file to the hard drive of another computer
or two. Sometimes drive-to-drive variations will let a different
machine read it.

Otherwise I would seek out a disk recovery service or program, with
the service probably having the higher likelihood of success. I
don't know who is good or not, however.

Here are some searches that will give some info, but I don't have
knowledge of the products.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=diskette.recovery

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...&q=floppy+recovery.service&btnG=Google+Search



See FAQ available at http://umpmfaq.info/faq.html item "You must
help me! My only floppy backup has a data error reading. What do I
do?" for another view.

 

[Tommy Becker]

Bob, I'm afraid I can't help you fix your problem, but I can advise you
to change your backup routine. I ran into this same problem the one
time in 4 or 5 years that I needed my backup file. I've seen others hit
it as well. Floppy backups are close to useless in Money as far as I
can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bug in the software. Stick
to CDROM or a second hard drive. Good luck with your current problem.

 

[Cal Learner-- MVP]

Bob, I'm afraid I can't help you fix your problem, but I can advise you
to change your backup routine. I ran into this same problem the one
time in 4 or 5 years that I needed my backup file. I've seen others hit
it as well. Floppy backups are close to useless in Money as far as I
can tell.

What leads you to say that? Did you run into the operating system
not being able to read the data from your floppies, or did you find
that Money would not restore from the data?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bug in the software. Stick
to CDROM or a second hard drive. Good luck with your current problem.

However I would not limit myself to a single set of floppies for
backup. Plus they are not very convenient if you need multiple
disks.

 

[Tommy Becker]

What leads you to say that? Did you run into the operating system
not being able to read the data from your floppies, or did you find
that Money would not restore from the data?

I don't recall exactly. I believe that Money refused to restore the
backup, giving a similar message to what Bob got. The backup did span 2
or 3 floppies. Bad disks is a possibility, but it wrote the backups
fine every week. Personally, I just wouldn't put any trust in Money
files backed up to floppy again.

 

[Bob Peel, MVP]

The fact that it *claimed* to write the floppies doesn't mean they can be
read!

Most utilities that backup to magnetic media e.g. DAT or magnetic tape,
perform a read pass after writing to make sure that the data can be read
back OK.