Family Historian User Group

I have been using Family Historian for years and love it but have a strange happening now.

When I go to open my gedcom file it says file format not recognised. I can open the sample project but not my main project.

If I open the sample project I can then navigate to my main project and open it but all the multimedia links are broken.

I can save and do a back-up but when I go to re-open the same thing happens and it says that if I am trying to insert a picture to click on Insert and choose the appropriate menu. All I am doing is trying to open my file that has numerous multimedia links that I don't want to have to re-set.

Any ideas anyone?

ID:4229

It's possible you have damage to your main file, perhaps a disk error or similar.

My first suggestion would be to restore a backup, just prior to the problem starting and see if that one works OK.

To check if your file is corrupted, open it in Notepad and check the first few lines. To do this go to your Gedcom file using Explorer and right click on the name. From the pop-up menu select Open With and then select Choose Program... In the list that is shown under Other Programs you should find Notepad. Select this and Notepad will run and open the Gedcom file as a text file.

The first few lines should be something like this
0 HEAD
1 SOUR FAMILY_HISTORIAN
2 VERS 4.0
2 NAME Family Historian
2 CORP Calico Pie Limited

The other thing to check for is that you are not attempting to open the backup file itself which is a .ZIP file.

Thank you so much, you were right in that the file was corrupt. The notepad output was complete nonsense. I saved the media file and deleted everything else as the back-ups had had their links corrupted too. I then imported the latest back-up and the media files separately and hey presto I seem to be back in business. Thanks so much for your help.