Desperately seeking assistance... r u smarter than Microsoft?

[rdaprix]

Bet you haven't seen this one before. Here we go! My hard drive crashed on my dell laptop. Bad. Took all my MS-Money 2004 data with it. Worse.

One saving grace—I have the MS-Money data running on my Pocket PC (It’s an XDA) running Pocket Money.


Here’s the problem—I can’t find a way to get Activesync to blow the data from the pocket PC into MS Money (keep in mind—there’s no backup file for Money on the PC).

Does anyone know a way to sync the pocket PC with the Laptop (that has a new hard drive) and have the PC import the data from the pocket PC? I can’t seem to make it work and neither can Microsoft.

I will bow down before you if you can figure out how to do this. It just won’t take the data from the pocket PC and use it in money.

Any and all ideas welcome. I really, really, don’t want to lose all of my transactions and tax data and spend the next four months reconstructing and manually keyboarding four years of transaction from checkbook ledgers.

I’m desperate. Please help.

Notes: I have three versions of MS Money—2000 standard, 2004, and 2005 Deluxe, so we can work with any of them. I have Pocket Money on the Pocket PC running the latest software and Pocket PC Money installed from the Money 2004 disk (months ago).

The only files that are current and up to date are on the pocket PC (and I cannot move or copy them, it’s been tried):
There MUST be a way to use this Pocket Money data somehow. I can see the data files on the pocket PC. They are:
Money 2000 accounts 2.47 kb
Money 2000 Categories 27.9 kb
Money 2000 Investments 1.60 kb
Money 2000 Payees 3.99 Gb
Money 2000 Transactions 3.99 Gb
Surely, there must be some way to use these files or extract these data files into MS Money.

Finally, I have a backup file from Money 2000 Standard edition dated January 16, 2004. The pocket PC file has the synced file with Money 2004. I have tried restoring the 2000 file from Jan-04 in Money 2004, and then syncing THAT version with the pocket PC, but all that does is corrupt the data on the PPC.

The pocket pc is completely backed up on the SD card so that when this happens I can restore the pocket PC and regain the correct money data on the pocket PC as of a week ago. That’s as close as I can get.

I really am in trouble if I can’t fix this—we have a baby coming shortly and no time to type in a years worth of transactions and we need those transactions for the taxes and medical benefits.

Any help that could be provided would be most welcome! Help!

Even Microsoft is thus far stumped!

[Steven Cedrone]

Post moved to software forum...

Steve

[[email protected]]

Quite a problem you have. I know how you feel! I use Money 2004 Deluxe and Pocket Money and have been since it was a PITA to sync anything on the PPC to Quicken. I have 2005 sitting on a shelf waiting for the latest version of Pocket Money to be released. Is Pocket Money from the 2004 CD compatible with Money 2005? I'm too scared to try it!

Here's what I would try in your situation. Create your Money "database" on your PC in Money 2004, create the accounts, make sure your settings in ActiveSync show the correct accounts, and then try syncing.

I'm not sure if there's a flag in the pocket db that tells the process it's a new or changed transaction. Perhaps that might be a key. If you have a way to view the databases, that might help make that determination.

[rdaprix]

I figured the real solution would be to load MS Money 2004, restore the Jan 16, 2004 back up file. This creates a .mny file and a .mbf backup file current as of Jan. 16, 2004.

Then you sync it with the PPC device and ‘add’ the new transaction that are on the ppc device but not on the desktop. Regrettably this only seem to corrupt the transactions on the ppc, and does not ‘add’ the ppc transaction s to the desktop device. This doesn’t make much sense since the programs were synced as recently as November 7th, 2004, and the transactions on the ppc device go back at least three years.

No luck thus far. Ugh! I can’t face the prospect of manually typing in every transaction from January to November on 10 different accounts. Any ideas?

[uzetaab]

I have a couple, but I have never seen any of these programs so they are just stabs in the dark.

1) could you create 2 databases on the PPC? So you would have the one from before the crash & the one upto January & then just cut & paste the missing sections?

2) It sounds like the files can be moved around within the PPC, but activesync will not let them be copied to the Desktop PC. Could you copy them to a storage card & then use a card reader to copy the files to the desktop? That would bypass activesync & allow you to get the files off.
The next problem would be whether the PC version can read the PPC file formats. But MS word & Excel do, so I figure that all MS products can read their PPC versions. if not, simply changing the file extensions to the PC versions may be enough to get the files open. Which would mean telling your PC to display file extensions for all file types. Typically, it only does that for un-requognised (bugger that.) un-known file types.

3)Actually, when I can't copy a file from PPC to PC, it's usually because the file conversion fails. If I tell Acivesync not to convert the files it usually lets me copy them.

That's all I've got for now. Good luck.

[Denis Khitrov]

I can propose one tricky way that may help. You can export Pocket PC MS Money database, convert them to QUIF and then import data to MS Money.
I'm sure that there are no special tools for this and you should do this work manually, but anyway it will be faster then entering all data manually via forms.

If you need I can send you simple tool that dumps DB to files.