Pack & Go relocate rules not performing as expected

[joe]

Hi. I'm struggling with Pack & Go after much testing between 2 computers. The computer username is the same on both. I've reconfigured some things to get some aspects to work, but here's my current issue - which I suspect must be something basic I'm doing wrong, or a bug. Let's call my devices ComputerD (most stuff on the D: drive) and ComputerC (all stuff on the C: drive). Attached is a sample rules set I'm using to go from ComputerD to ComputerC. (With a similar set of rules, going from ComputerC to ComputerD seems to work.)

First question which I can't find in the documentation: should I be using "Restore to original folders" or "Restore to a different folder" when using rules? Going from ComputerC to ComputerD works using "original folders." Going from ComputerD to ComputerC doesn't work with "original folders" because it fails with an error that it can't create the original D:\IMatch directory (of course, because there's no D: drive on ComputerC - and all the rules tell it not to put anything on D anyway). Perhaps that's a bug with how Pack & Go works?

So, when going to ComputerC, I try the "using a different folder" option. In that case, it creates a new folder with the name of the impag file in the folder I gave it, and into that it puts these 3 folders: the IMatch folder, the ProgramData folder and the Users folder. Clearly this isn't what I want.

Thanks for any guidance!

[Mario]

This sounds like Pack& Go is working correctly.
Restore to original folders means, for example, everything that was packed from "c:\program\data\photools.com\IMatch6" will be unpacked to that folder. Same for %APPDATA\photools.com\IMatch folder hierarchy.

If your database was packed from "d:\data\imatch\bla.imd5", Pack & Go will unpack to that folder.
If that disk does not exist on the target device, Pack & Go can of course not do that and it will fail.

That's what the Restoring to a Different Folder option is for.
If unpacks the package into the folder you select, allowing you to copy files to different folders as needed.

In general, when you frequently use Pack & Go to transfer settings and databases between to computers, make sure that the package can be restored into the same folders.

c:\program data... and %APPDATA% are usually always on the system disk C: and the database too.
If you have your database on C: in one computer but on D: in the other computer, you will always have to restore the package into a temporary folder and copy the files yourself. You cannot restore individual files into individual folders.

Or, maybe make a drive mapping using subst or mount a folder on the original computer so you can access the database from the D: drive even if you have only one disk in that system. You can attach additional drive letters to disks in Windows Disk Manager.

[joe]

If you have your database on C: in one computer but on D: in the other computer, you will always have to restore the package into a temporary folder and copy the files yourself.

OK. I will figure out a process that can work for me then. Thanks for confirming the behavior!