Sorting out a mess!

Dagwood · Post by **Dagwood** » 14 Dec 2010 23:04

I appear to have got my Kn****rs in a twist. If you are sitting comfortably I'll begin.... Recently I purchased a Notepad for use away from my PC and when away from home. Being to smart for my own good I tried DropBox to keep files up to date regardless of which m/c I was using. I now appear to have added records which are on one m/c and not the other and vise versa. In addition the backups are in a similar state of confusion. My question is whether there is some way a Gedcom or project file can be compared with another to highlight either identical reords or those that are in one file only? Or is it just a case of working through two files open at the same time on both m/cs and compare them and copy manually any unique records? Any suggestions welcome.
Dagwood [confused]

ID:4900

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 15 Dec 2010 07:55

Dropbox should have kept the files in sync, if you moved the Project Folder to the Dropbox folder on BOTH machines.

I would just copy the gedcom file (the easy way will be to make a temp folder in the dropbox folder and use the export gedcom file to save it to the new folder) from one machine to the other and use the Merge Compare option to merge the two files (remember to check any family records have merged correctly).

Then double check the location of the Project folder on both machines (you can see this at the base of the Project Window and make sure both are in the Dropbox folder with the same names, and that the Project names are the same.

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 15 Dec 2010 11:04

I wonder if part of the problem was that you may not have had internet access when you recorded the data away from home and therefore Dropbox couldn't have updated until you got home. If you then started to manually update the 'home version' before Dropbox could update then things would have got very confused.

Gerry

Dagwood · Post by **Dagwood** » 15 Dec 2010 15:15

Jane and Gerry, my thanks to you for taking the trouble to not only give advice on how to sort out the mess but assist in showing me how it was created in the first place. To paraphrase ' If you don't know where you've been you can't know where you are going!'
I will have a go at your method Jane and in reading through some other threads I realise that my mess has been caused by not only having done possibly as Gerry suggested but in losing track of the location of the project files and hence opening the wrong ones when using either the netbook or my PC. Having just changed the main disk on my PC I did not check to see that the location for back-ups had changed also.[oops]
The point you make about the DropBox sync is I think also 100% spot-on. I have just started using it and I don't think I had the technique sorted out in my mind. Hence I assumed that working on files on the two m/c's would synchronise when in fact I see that I should have been working on the file in my DropBox. Oh,fool that I am!!
Now to try and sort it out following your advice,thanks again
Dagwood

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