Transferring Scan to a new PC (XP to Win 7)

[Anonymous]

Hello

I have been using scan now for about a year as a way of indexing academic papers for a dissertation that I am writing at Univertsity. There are over 2,000 documents in the collection. Scan has great potential as a research tool.

I was wondering whether there was any facility to move the repository and collection of documents to another PC - say from one running windows xp to one running windows 7 - which has a different file structure to windows xp where the collection is currently residing.

I can back up all of the data but a windows 7 machin has a differenrt file structure that is not similar to a collection residing in windows xp.

[Alex Alishevskikh]

Hi,

You are right, there are different paths where the SCAN data folder is located on Windows XP and Windows 7.

Windows XP:
C:\Documents and settings\<username>\.scan

Windows7:
C:\Users\<username>\.scan

So, you need to make a copy of the ".scan" folder on XP machine and paste it into "C:\Users\<username>" folder on Windows 7. Make sure SCAN is not running when the folder is replaced.

Note that for correct work on another system, the original paths to the indexed local documents should be preserved. That is, you may need to recreate the same folder structure for original documents as it was on the old system.

[Anonymous]

Hello Alexeya

Thank you for the prompt reply.

I think the problem is with the copying of the file structure of the file collection to the new operating system  as the XP structure is quite different from Win 7. Any ideas about how to get around this?

Paul

[Alex Alishevskikh]

I think the problem is only if your files are located in a special system folder, like the Desktop or "My Documents". Then yes, paths to these folders are different on Windows XP and Windows 7.

The original file paths are stored in SCAN index and the application expects to find the files at these paths. If the file is not found at its original path, SCAN will conclude that it has been deleted and will remove it from the repository on the first location update.

So, the only workaround I have in my mind is to re-create XP folder structures on Windows 7.
For instance, if the files were in My Documents, there should be "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\" created on the new system - that is, the folder with exactly the same path as on the machine where the files had been indexed. Then the files will not be lost by SCAN, but of course, it means that they won't be visible in your Windows7 "Documents" folder (which is under "C:\Users\…", actually). Perhaps, there is a way in Windows7 to configure the "Documents" to point to another location in the filesystem - that would make access to your files more convenient.