Donor Manager Software

I often receive questions like this, asking how to share Donor Manager data among 2 computers (non-networked).

I have a query now in that we have also installed the Donor Manager programme on my wife’s computer too. The thing I would like to do now is to copy the database that I have built up on my computer on to my wife’s computer so that files are the same.

My query therefore is which files contain the data for the programme to use?

Am I right in assuming it is all contained in the donor.dbf file or are there other files also that contain the need info from the database?

First of all, there are a series of data files in c:\donor5\data that contain the data. Actually, all of them are needed to do a total transfer of data from one computer to another. The file donor.dbf contains the partner names and addresses. The notes are in another file (donor.fpt), contributions are in gift.dbf, etc. It's not like Access where all of the various tables of data are contained in just one file.

Now, having said that, the easiest way to do this is to use the Donor Manager "Pack and Go" feature (in fact, that is what this designed for).



Choose this feature on computer #1, and tell it you want to create a "Pack and Go" file. It will create a single, compressed file (default filename is date_donor_data.tza) that can be transferred and imported into computer #2.



You can also create a pack and go file for your photos as well.

On computer 2, also choose "Pack and Go".... tell it you want to import a pack and go file, and it pretty much handles the rest.

I use a USB flash drive to do this and it works great. You can use a CD, email, network, whatever.

FYI: The .tza file is a compressed file containing all of the donor manager data files. It is basically like a zip file (but is not compatable with zip). I often save a .tza file to my Yahoo briefcase account or email it as an attachment to my Hotmail (both of which I use as an online backup). It's a quick way to backup my donor data to an outside data vault.

Now, be aware, this routine does not "synch" the data between the two files (yet.... that's coming), so just one person has the "live" data. Don't make changes in both places ... someone will lose their work.
[/img]

"Now, be aware, this routine does not "synch" the data between the two files (yet.... that's coming), so just one person has the "live" data. Don't make changes in both places ... someone will lose their work."


You said in this post that '(yet.... that's coming)' and this was posted in 2004. Is there a way to set up donor manager to have two users on different computers using the program at the same time and not have to have master?

Thanks

Yep, wondering the same here...is there way to use DM on two computers where it will sync with each other on a network? Thanks so much!

The current version is still "single user at a time" on a network.

Sorry.

Incidentlly, though, my wife and I have been using "DropBox" to keep our 2 copies of the DM "in synch. Only one of us can update at a time (so it is not an ideal situation), but it really works nicely.

I thought I'd post here and share my experience; my wife and I are also using Dropbox to share Donor Manager data. When you run the installation, choose a Dropbox subfolder as your installation folder, and it'll put everything in there. Now, Donor Manager will not have a Start Menu shortcut on the second computer, so I'd suggest getting used to the idea of launching Donor Manager by double-clicking on the donor.exe file in the subfolder you chose as your installation folder.

So far this has worked well for us, although as has been pointed out only one of us can have DM open at a time or we'll start overwriting each other's changes. We've only done it a few weeks, though, so I haven't yet had to do things like printing envelopes out of it or anything.

Incidentally, I'm using Wine on Linux and my wife is doing this on a WinXP virtual machine within a Mac.

For those of you with a mac with virtual windows..I am too, but for whatever reason dm won't run in the windows virtual machine environment. It's giving me a startup error...any suggestions? The error message says: file does not exist. Line number: 250 Line with error: do "c:\program files\donor5\donor.exe Module: savefiletime Any suggestions are welcome...