Coming in v9.1 - Backup issues for Vista users

Posted on November 1, 2009

This is an important change for anyone who is using Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is not starting RentMaster as an administrator.  If you are not sure if you are an administrator or not, you should probably assume you are not.  All other versions of windows is not affected.

In windows Vista, Microsoft decided to help protect their users by creating something called File Virtualization (google it if you want to find out more).  This meant that lots of different locations on your computer became read only, so you could not save your files there.  One of those locations is the location where RentMaster is installed, the Program Files folder.  Because you can no longer save files there (unless you are an administrator), behind the scenes windows was creating a second copy of all the files you wanted to write to, and one of those files was the RentMaster database file.

This change did not affect RentMaster, until it came to doing a database backup.  RentMaster was not aware Windows was creating a second database file, so it was continuing to back up the original file, which in effect was not being used.  The backup would complete successfully, but it was backing up the wrong file.

In version 9.1 of RentMaster, the backup procedure now goes looking for a second database, and if it finds one, it will backup the file which has been modified most recently.

Also in version 9.1, if you go to the maintenance menu and choose Options/Networking, it will display the location where the database file is, which may be the alternative location where windows has put it.