TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 1999-11 > 0942445656


From: Lee Hoffman/KY <>
Subject: Re: TMG-L: Sharing TMG files
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 17:27:36 -0500


Connie wrote:
>My sister and I are recent purchasers of the new version of TMG and expect to
>be working together to get our family data entered into both of our identical
>programs. We live in two different states. We have not figured out how we
>go about transferring our work from one of our computers to the other and
>visa versa. We're hoping we can create a file and then attach it to e-mail
>to send it to the other for adding to the family information. How may this
>best be accomplished?

There are a number of ways to share data although, depending on your needs,
not many are very easy. As a generality, genealogy programs today are good
for individual work with some programs allowing you to share data with
others. This share capability allows one to see what another researcher is
doing and often allows you to merge their work in with yours. However,
this merging may or may not be exactly what you want.

If you and your cousin are both using TMG, then the capability to exchange
data is fairly easy. One of you would create a backup of their dataset and
then send that backup file (entitled xxxxxxx#.SQX with xxxxxxx being the
name of your dataset and # being a digit) to the other person. When the
SQZ file is received, you would select File=>Restore from the menu and
select the SQZ file to restore it. Be careful if you both use the same
name for your dataset as one may overwrite the other. When I receive a TMG
backup file (*.SQZ) from another researcher, I often rename the file to a
filename with their initials included to distinguish that file from my own
or another researcher's files.

This one file may be somewhat small (less than 1Mb) and relatively easy to
send by e-mail or it may be rather large and thus not as easy to send by
e-mail. After the first exchange of data, you would probably only exchange
new data which would be fairly small and easy to send by e-mail.

The problem then is how to exchange data that is only new. I have done
this by setting a Custom Flag to Y after the first exchange indicating the
data has been exchanged once. Then when I update that person or add a new
person, I set this Custom Flag to N indicating The data has not been
exchanged. When I am ready to exchange data again, I create a List of
People Report using a Focus filter of:
CUSTOM Flag Equals N END
When I generate the report, I select Create a New Dataset from the
Secondary Output tab of the Report Definition Screen. After the new
dataset is generated, I check it out and then do a TMG Backup.

Remember that this new dataset will often include persons that have been
exchanged before and will result in duplicate persons which must also be
merged. The merged person will often then have many duplicate tags from
prior exchanges.

Until genealogy programs provide for efficient exchange of data between
researchers, the above procedure followed by "clean-up" will continue to be
about the best that one may hope for.

Hope this helps -



----------
Lee Hoffman/KY
E-mail:
My website: <http://www.users.mis.net/~lhoffman>;
--------------
A user of the best genealogy program, The Master Genealogist (TMG)

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