You should probably raise a support ticket to see if your online collection is broken somehow, and if there is an older backup stored on Invelos servers.

This shows how important it is to have an extra physical backup, for example on an external hard drive or usb stick. And also to test it once in a while to see if your backup solution actually works.

What both of them said. You can pick up a thumb drive (usb stick) very cheap to keep a copy of your most recent back-up. Then in the future you can install DVDP on any computer and restore your current back-up.

Sorry for your loss.

Quoting Kathy:

Quote:
I've had a run of bad luck with computers - 3 lemons in a row - having 1 break after a year, the 2nd in 9 months and the latest after 6 months.

I have a very old computer that I have profiler on if I have to but I don't feel like buying anything to download my collection.

I want to be able to download from my online to this computer and don't understand why I can't

Kathy, I get the impression that it is costing you more, not having a backup. If you had simply invested in a cheap USB thumb drive, you could have avoided the inconvenience, the forum posts, etc.  I don't know of any advice given by any of the members of this forum that suggests that you can confidently avoid backups by downloading from the online. You can persist in that fantasy at your continued peril and risk. Just wishing for it to not be so, won't make it so.

Sorry to issue this "tough love," but at some point you have to accept that you have to make backups. Period.

I do have backups - one on my old computer and one on the one that has to be fixed.

Thankfully, all the computers were under warranty and I haven't had to pay anything to get them fixed/replaced.

It's aggravating to have them break down and wait for them to get fixed. I'm very careful with them and frustrated that the computers I've gotten were so poorly made that I've had to go though the process of getting them fixed/replaced.

For example, the AC adapter on my last computer got very hot. When I took it back to Office Depot they said it was normal. It wasn't - it ended up ruining the computer.

I sent it to Toshiba who fixed it but sent it back so poorly packaged the computer screen got broken.

Office Depot fixed the screen but broke other parts on the keyboard. So, after almost 3 months without a computer, they gave me a new computer.

This new Toshiba lasted 6 months before it broke again. I don't know what is wrong this time but it wouldn't turn on.

I took it back to Office Depot who pressed and held the on button. It turned the computer off, he pressed it again and it worked.

This worked for a few minutes but then the computer turned off again. Back to the store - no luck this time.

It is still under warranty so it isn't going to cost me anything - except for the aggravation and not having my computer again.

Now I have the aggravation of not being able to download my collection. I hate technology.

I may go back to using paper and pencil to keep track of my collection - I never had a problem then. 

Quoting Kathy:

Quote:
I may go back to using paper and pencil to keep track of my collection - I never had a problem then.

Did you use Group Dividers for Crew Teams with only one crew member then? Did you have Crew Group End Type Dividers?

Quoting mreeder50:

Quote:
What both of them said. You can pick up a thumb drive (usb stick) very cheap to keep a copy of your most recent back-up. Then in the future you can install DVDP on any computer and restore your current back-up.

That's what I would recommend doing in the future also. It's quite easy to restore your database to a different computer then.

I only do that once in a while though, perhaps every couple of weeks, since I have an internal backup hard drive. If one hard drive fails, the other should be okay to restore everything. If somehow both should fail, I'll at least have a relatively recent backup on the USB drive. I've been lucky though, and haven't had a hard drive failure since 1996. I swear by Western Digital drives.

Downloading your online collection should only be used as a last resort, because things can often not transfer correctly as we are seeing here.

I've been running DVDP on two seperate computers for a long time.

I, too, use a USB thumb drive both as a means of transport and backup at the same time.

However, I do not use the backup function from DVDP because it's just too time-consuming.

Here's what I do. I simply backup the files in the Databases folder that are newer than the ones on my thumbdrive.

For this I use Beyond Compare, because it shows me exactly which files I need to copy and saves a lot of time.




But that's just me.

You don't need to understand it, that's the beauty of it. Red just means "newer". Blue means "doesn't exist on the other side".

If you like, I can show it to you via Skype.