how screwed am i? lost data

hello group - can anyone give me any feedback/advice? i have an old pc and
use money 99

i have been using money religously since 1998 with account activity going
back to 1987. i love it and it has helped me accomplish many of my
financial goals. but i am one of these nuts who keeps track of my accounts
so closely that i will even categorize a penny found on the street.

well i needed to reformat my hard drive and re-install the operating system
(virus?). i kept multiple backup copies of my money file on the slave hard
drive and on one set of floppy disk. somehow in the process my pc now does
recognize the slave, i think that i accidentaly reformated the slave as
well, and money says it cannot restore from the floppy backup set (2 disks)
saying that the floppy is corrupted?

it looks like the data is on both floppies, but money cant open it and i
cant even copy it to another drive. i havent removed the slave drive to see
if anything is salvageable off of it yet. what should i do next?

if i lost it all, i guess its not the end of the world, i will just start
fresh, but i am bummed and will never be able to restore the cash account.
hindsight is always 20/20, but what i should have done was kept a few more
floppy sets around and verified that they would have opened in a new file in
money. also, i should have printed the totals of my cash account by each
year sorted by category so that i could re-create it in summary form.

thanks in advance for any advice -

Chris

via_newsgroup
Sat Dec 11 09:17:04 CST 2004

In microsoft.public.money, Chris Shea wrote:

>hello group - can anyone give me any feedback/advice? i have an old pc and
>use money 99
>
>i have been using money religously since 1998 with account activity going
>back to 1987. i love it and it has helped me accomplish many of my
>financial goals. but i am one of these nuts who keeps track of my accounts
>so closely that i will even categorize a penny found on the street.
>
>well i needed to reformat my hard drive and re-install the operating system
>(virus?). i kept multiple backup copies of my money file on the slave hard
>drive and on one set of floppy disk. somehow in the process my pc now does
>recognize the slave, i think that i accidentaly reformated the slave as
>well, and money says it cannot restore from the floppy backup set (2 disks)
>saying that the floppy is corrupted?
>
>it looks like the data is on both floppies, but money cant open it and i
>cant even copy it to another drive. i havent removed the slave drive to see
>if anything is salvageable off of it yet. what should i do next?

First, write-protect each floppy with the little slider. Do not
consider any solution that requires you to unprotect those floppies.

I would try to 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.

Presumably you will fail when you try to copy one or more of the
.mbf 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.

Then consider taking the hard drive that may not been formatted and
install it on a different computer as a second drive. Search that
drive for *.mny, *.mbf files.

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


>
>if i lost it all, i guess its not the end of the world, i will just start
>fresh, but i am bummed and will never be able to restore the cash account.
>hindsight is always 20/20, but what i should have done was kept a few more
>floppy sets around and verified that they would have opened in a new file in
>money. also, i should have printed the totals of my cash account by each
>year sorted by category so that i could re-create it in summary form.
>
>thanks in advance for any advice -

In the future, I would backup alternately to two flash drives. They
are more reliable than floppies, and have more capacity.

Once a month, or so, I would copy a backup file to a CDR.

Garry
Sat Dec 11 09:10:59 CST 2004

if you can't even copy your money files from a floppy or backup HD then of
course money won't be able to open it
I've lost lots of stuff that way. What I learned is this: DO NOT USE
FLOPPIES FOR BACKUP.
Use Tape, CDR or CDRW and keep multiple copies.

Sorry, I feel your pain

Brent
Sat Dec 11 10:54:24 CST 2004

For the life of me, I don't understand the obsession of backing up Money
on floppies (which I have never done). Is Money the only thing on
people's computers worth backing-up?

Backups should be performed on a regular basis for ALL of one's
important documents that change, as well as system settings (registry,
etc.), and that means tape, removable optical media or an external hard
drive. Our newest machine uses DVD+RW, while an older machine uses
Travan NS 20GB tape. Both use Backup MyPC (formerly Veritas Backup
Exec).

Every few days (or daily if significant changes have been made), I copy
our Money files ("Brent's Money.mny") and rename them with the date
(e.g. "Brent's Money 2004.12.11.mny"). Then on a weekly (OK, I confess,
sometimes monthly) basis, I backup to DVD+RW, which should eventually
end up off-site in a safety deposit box at the bank.

We've all been there, Chris, so I'm sensitive to your pain, but perhaps
this can be both a learning experience and wake-up call for all of us.

--
Brent Neville