Backup and Restore

Former Member over 14 years ago

I am confused about the action of file>backup. I use two computers with Homeport. One is a power hungry lap top with big bright screen for planning while on land and one low power net book for working with under sail. I had expected to be able to create a timestamped back up file on land and restore it to the netbook for sailing. Later do the reverse.
I thought that the whole data would be backed up, including My Collection and all of the folders, maybe some of my Options settings.
I find that only My Collection is restored on the netbook, and that merges with any folders that pre-existed on the destination machine. Folders are not restored.
Due to the lack of filtering in Homeport, and the lack of storage in my 5212 chart plotter, I have been forced to carefully craft a set of useful folders. A task that I feel is unnecessarily complicated and the results can be too full of holes, (but that will be the subject of my next thread). It appears that I would have to do all that work again on the next machine if only My Collection gets restored.
I guess if the big machine ever crashes, or should I say when it inevitably crashes, my folders will be lost forever. Unless I back each folder up individually.
My work around is to drag the folders one by one onto an SD card and then up load them one by one onto the next pc and certain selected ones to the chart plotter. It seems faster than doing a backup and restore for each folder.
Surely backup should enable a complete restore?

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

First of all, let me clarify what backup/restore can and cannot do:

Backup/Restore currently does not work across computers. i.e. data that you backup on one computer will not be restored on another computer.
Backup/Restore restores your folder structure along with your waypoints/routes/tracks.
Restore does not perform a merge. It overwrites the current state of your data with what you restored.

If you are observing something other than above, please contact [email][email protected][/email]

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

OK, that's clear then. My misunderstanding.
Homeport backup and restore performs just as you say. When I saw the result of transferring the backup across computers (as I do with Fugawi) I became alarmed and wrongly assumed that it behaved the same way on its home machine.
To transfer between computers I will drag and drop the folders, one at a time to an SD card and then upload the adm files one at a time to the next pc.

Thanks for your all your prompt replies. Your attention is much appreciated.

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

Here is some advanced user* instructions if you want to transfer your backup across computers:
Rename the .backup file to .zip. Unzip it to get a directory structure containing a few files. Replace the existing version of those files with the ones you unzipped. The directory structure you get from unzipping the file will give you clues as to where to find the files that need to be replaced.

*Please use at your own risk after making copies of all files involved in case something goes wrong.

0 Former Member over 14 years ago

Many thanks, I'll try that. It seems a bit long winded. I might be better off using adm files via an SD card. If I have a problem I'll post again.

0 rwidman over 14 years ago

I use two PCs and one plotter. I just copy all my routes onto an SD card on one computer and then upload them from the card to the other computer.

This does require that I keep track of which computer has the latest information on it, but that would be the case regardless of how it's done unless it were possible to store and access the files on a network or the Internet.

Because some of my routes contained more points than allowed by my plotter, I had to break them up into sections and that put my route count over what my plotter could handle. My solution is to have folders on an SD card for different directions (North, South, Local, in my case), and load the appropriate routes into the plotter as needed. This is a plotter issue, not a HomePort issue.