Copying BigOven to a New Machine / Reinstalls

stevemur — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:53:09 GMT

We received the following question:

"I purchased your program several months ago. I just love it. However, we have a major virus on our computer and now need to format the entire hardrive and start over on our computer. After reloading your program back on our computer will I have lost my own recipes that i imputed on your program?"

Answer:

Sorry to hear about your PC woes!

The only user-data files that BigOven uses are the ones in the "My BigOven Recipes" folder. The application itself installs to c:\Program Files\Lakefront Software\BigOven.

So, in a nutshell, you can re-download BigOven (optionally enter your serial number to enable the full version), run setup to install it, then simply use Windows File Explorer to copy over your full "My BigOven Recipes" folder and all its underlying files & sub-folders back into its expected location. The expected location is your "Shared Documents" folder for Windows XP users. That's it.

More specifically, take these steps to preserve your BigOven recipe files during the migration to a fresh machine (or to a new machine):

1) Launch BigOven and note your serial number in Help/About. We can re-email you your serial number via our support page, too.

2) Make a copy of the recipe and shopping list data. Locate your "My BigOven Recipes" folder, and check the "last modified" dates to make sure you've got the most recent ones. You can search for the files named "*.crb" to locate them easily. Usually, they are either under your "My Documents" folder or your "Shared Documents" folder. If you've updated multiple times, you may have a couple copies -- you can check the "last modified" date in Windows Explorer to make sure you have the most recent set.

3) Copy that entire file folder (and its subfolders) to a CD-ROM. You might want to virus check those files before doing so. (We don't ship any viruses of course but your files might have become infected somehow.)

3) Uninstall whatever other programs you want and wipe your drive.

5) Re-download BigOven from www.bigoven.com/download.aspx and install it and exit out of BigOven.

Now it's time to copy back your old recipe and shopping list data files so your fresh BigOven installation can work with it.

By default, on Windows XP, from version 1.8.9 on, BigOven creates the "My BigOven Recipes" folder under "Shared Documents" (no longer "My Documents").

The "Shared Documents" folder literally in the following filepath: c:\documents and settings\all users\documents

So, you want to copy your "My BigOven Recipes" folder, and all its files and subfolders exactly as they were, under the "Shared Documents" folder (c:\documents and settings\all users\documents).

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Copying BigOven to a New Machine / Reinstalls