MyInfo Community Forums

I use MYInfo exclusively as a portable application on a USB SSD drive so that I can easily move my work data between home office and office and laptop when I am travelling. Over the years that I have done this I have found USB drives to be somewhat unreliable with some data getting corrupted. If you search for reasons for this on Google it says that it is caused by not correctly dismounting the drive before removal. This is in fact incorrect as even if you shut down your system before removing the drive or use the windows tool to safely remove the drive, some data still occasionally gets fried. I'm now using a piece of software called USB Safely Remove and still get problems. Unfortunately some of those problems are with MyInfo. I Have about 20 myinfo files which all open when I launch MyInfo. Sometimes one of those files doesn't open. ON checking I find that the file is now 0 bytes. So I go to the backup file where there are 2 files of different sizes. A .mib file and a .verified.mib file. The verified file is invariably smaller. What I don't get is why is the verified file smaller as this means that the most reliable backup file is always unreliable as it is missing data. In the most recent case where a file didn't open. I find the .mib file contains data but the .verified.mib file has 0 bytes. So my question is: is there a way to run MyInfo locally on my PC (Which hopefully would stop my data getting destroyed by Bill Gates' inability to write reliable software for controlling USB drives) and then copy all the topics to USB drive for use elsewhere with the portable application?

Yes, there's a way.

Install the portable version in a folder (say, "MyInfo 6 Portable") on your PC and laptop just as you would install it on a USB drive. That is, instead of choosing the USB as your installation location, choose a folder on your hard drive. You can then use it as portable installations out of those folders instead of the USB drive and copy topic files between the two installations.

The downside is that you have to keep them in sync manually. You can do that by checking the timestamp of topic files before pasting to avoid inadvertently overwriting a newer topic with an older one.

PS: I believe, even if you install it as native Windows application, you can copy topic files between multiple installations. But for your purpose, installing the portable version is a cleaner way to do it.