Help - in Dire Straits!

[saucysal]

I upgraded to V10.0.2 yesterday and got everything working fine during the night and was receiving and processing orders today. Then I wanted to change a colour from pale blue to white in the Design: Themes as customers complaining couldn't read very well in Checkout. But this completely messed up the website, and Checkout Out now buttons etc disappeared (were white), other things gone in design which couldn't rectify, so decided to import Snapshot made this afternoon, design files only (one of the options). This involved it backing up the site first. Then an error message saying it couldn't find ActinicCatalog.mdb. Crashed. Couldn't open Actinic. File should be in Site1 directory as usual, but not there, but there was a backupofactiniccatalog.mdb1, created this evening. So I made a copy of this and renamed it ActinicCatalog.mdb. Actinic comes up with error message when I try to open as there being an error with this, to do with setup file. I cannot contact Support until tomorrow. Website in mess and cannot access anything, and stock may be going out if anybody is able to actually order. Any suggestions?
Sarah

[jmedinger]

Did you do a backup at any point (i.e. shut down Actinic and select option to backup site) once you were upgraded to 10.0.2?

If you did, look in C:\Program Files\Actinic v10\Site Backups and there'll be a 'Backup.mdb' and maybe a 'Previous.mdb' file in there that you can use to replace your corrupted 'Actiniccatalog.mdb' (Just copy it across to the My Documents\Actinic v10\Sites\Site 1 folder and rename it)

You might find that works to get Actinic running again

[saucysal]

Fixed

Hello Jos. Unfortunately I had made a snapshot just before the problem, but not a backup of actiniccatalog.mdb, however this would not have helped as it happens. I contacted Actinic first thing this morning. It turns out that the aforementioned snapshot that I was trying to import after messing things up was faulty. Desperate to get things sorted asap, as many orders sitting on site needing to be despatched today, I uninstalled V10 and erased files, re-installed V10, and I imported the previous snapshot, done just after the upgrade to V10. Only slight problem was a pspsetup.exe had to be installed, which I did, and am missing order histories in the gap. The latter is not a major problem as we do not process orders in Actinic, but export them to Sage, and have records therefore on Sage and the printed order data sheets from Actinic with records of tracking codes, etc.

However, I am now being more careful about database backups, as well as snapshots, doing more often, even if this was not the actual problem.

Sarah

[jmedinger]

You need to make backups and snapshots almost a religion with Actinic

Because the software is located on 1 PC you only have to have a faulty disk drive or something and suddenly your entire store is out of action. More to the point, if you kept your snapshots etc on the same hard disk then you can't even get to those to install on another machine.

****
Always Always keep your *DAILY* snapshots on an external drive so that if the unthinkable happens and your PC blows up you only have to install Actinic on another machine and you have a snapshot available to you to get you back up and running
****

[Sean Williams]

Hmm - I can't see making DAILY snapshots being practical really - it takes sooo long to make a snapshot, that over 3 or 4 sites, the PC would be tied up doing that and nothing else for the best part of half a day.
We always make DB backups at the end of each day, to both a NS and also to a portable drive.
We only do snapshots when the site changes. These are also to both the NAS and to the portable drive.
Thus, in theory, we have three chances of being able to re-install, anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Whilst sipping a cool Martini of course.