Just wanted to share my near catastrophic experience.
I have Sage Instant V14, which I rarely use. I had a clients data from a previous year on it because when I took him on last year, his previous bookkeeper had used an older version of Instant. I took a back up and restored it to my version - no problems.
Had to do a lot of work on it due to previous bad bookkeeping (another story) but started the client on VT Transactions for the new financial year but kept Sage alive, just in case of inspections.
To get to the point, a friend of mine, who had Sage Instant V15, and had been playing catch up for 2009-2010. Anyway, he messed up some opening balances, so me being the kind soul I am offered to take a backup and see if I could restore it to my version, so that I could try and sort it for him. I was aware that it might not be backward compatible but thought I had nothing to lose. WRONG!! It broke my programme.
Having taken several backups of the original data, I cleared all the previous clients data off the software. I then proceeded to restore the new data, and got a message saying no Sage data found. However, it had brought in all the company information with no transactions. I tried restore again and the programme just shut down.
When I tried to reopen the programme it said that I was already logged in. No problem with that (it has happened before), so I cleared the QUEUE.DTA file from the company data, which clears the log-in. Now the programme froze on the Sage opening splash screen. After several, Ctrl/Alt/Del and clearing the processes and repeating the above, I reinstalled the software. Guess what, made no difference, it just froze on the splash screen.
If it wasn't for the fact that I had a clients data stored in a Sage back up, I would have just scrapped Sage but as it was I needed the programme to work. After 2 days of trying various things (uninstalling and completely removing all the Sage files doesn't make any difference, it still knows that the programme has been previously installed), I finally managed to get it back to a usable state by deleting a file called SETUP.DTA, which fooled it into thinking that there was no company info stored and went to a screen that asked me to insert a backup disk. I used the original data back up, and to my relief it loaded up the original client, and it seems OK.
I know a few bookkeepers, interchange their client data using the above method. The point of this (long-winded) story is to warn any one that does this frequently, that it does not always work.
almost seems like Sage was trying to force you to get the new copy by making the old version unusable after using the backup created in the newer version - evil!!
OMG That may be what is happening to me tonight. I just posted an urgent plea for help. Can you read that and let me know. I will try what you said though.
I am stressed to say the least, vat quarter looming and can't get in!!!
This is my very first ever post so bare with me. I have been a bookkeeper for over 10 years now and I know sage pretty well so il try and help you out.
You probably have already tried this, as the above people have, but incase you havent! If you have an up to date backup file of your sage data then you could always try a system restore through the system tools to an earlier date. This is my mind would be a way of establishing from the outset whether you need to dig deeper!
Sage is a nightmare for compatibility. unfortunately it is not backwards compatible and the newer versions install the program paths to for example..."C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sage SBD\SBDDesktop.exe" and then have the starting folder for example C:\SageLine50v11\
As well as that you have the files in C:\Users\Paul\AppData\Local\Sage
so there are many folders with the relevant files that need to be cleared out before a fresh install.
if you can find the file called "company" in any of the sage folders, this lists the paths to the relevant company data and if you clear this out (open it in notepad), then this may give you a better starting point and get your installation to recognize that no company exists so it starts you afresh and asks to set a new one up.
There may be more than 1 "company" file so beware.
I'm extreemly grateful for this advice....It worked perfectly! I deleted SETUP.DTA after having tried all the options you described and many hours later having got no further. My problem was after my auditor sent back a Sage V14 file to restore, and he hadn't checked the version I was working on, so it locked up. This solution is perfect if you have a backup copy of you accounts to restore.
