50 Support

Migrating TOPS to a new server

As your business grows and new technologies develop, you may want to upgrade your server or move from a peer to peer network to a server based network. Because the successful operation of your company or community is dependent upon your TOPS Software program, it is important to make the migration of your TOPS data from the old server to the new server as seamless as possible.

These are the best practice steps that should be followed to migrate TOPS from one server to another:

1. On the new server do a full install of TOPS Software to the root of a local drive and if it is not present install the Microsoft .NET framework. (Note TOPS software installation and TOPS data must reside in same location. Lockbox feature does not like deep directory structures or directories with spaces in the name.)
2. Download and install the TOPS Software registration key from the Internet Control Center within TOPS.
3. Copy data from the old server to the new server.* You should only need to copy your community data folders, the Master folder, and the phone messenger database. (If you are using the phone messenger feature. The database is called PhoneMsg.mdb and it is located in the root of the TOPS2000 directory)
4. Run the Internet Updater on the server to ensure you have the latest TOPS file versions.
5. Share out and set permissions on the TOPS2000 directory on the server. The users group must have everything except full permissions. (In Windows XP make sure the users have permissions to modify files.)
6. On all workstations that are going to run TOPS, do a full install to the local drive and make sure to install the Microsoft .NET framework if it is not present. You only need to do this if TOPS is not already installed on the workstation.
7. Map a drive from each workstation to the shared TOPS directory on the server.
8. Open TOPS; TOPS may come up in demo mode. If so that is normal, simply select the sample community, click on administration, click set community data path, and point to the shared TOPS data on the server. (i.e. mapped network drive.)
9. Close TOPS and re-open. You should get a message at this point that says the server has newer files and would you like to update. Choose to update the files from server. Once finished click OK. TOPS should open automatically and you should see all of your communities.
10. At this point TOPS should be successfully migrated to the new server and all workstations should be configured to use the new server.

*Users of the TOPS Internet Backup Service may use the restore feature to quickly transfer data to the new server. Be sure to restore the "System Files" first to populate the community list in TOPS v3.2.1™.

by Carl Beal,
Network Administrator

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