[paulcarter]

I Back up on thumb drive the symantec file, winfax file, and data file every month to thumb drive after a year ago having computer crash. I just tried to restore message files, my last backup to thumb drive was febuary 2012 but my message file are now only up to march 2011 instead of Febuary 2012. Alot of important information needed. Please help

[Administrator]

I assume you backed up the files in the SymantecWinFaxData folder to your thumb drive? If so, how did you “restore” these files?

[paulcarter]

I went to local disc C, then program files then symantec then to winfax then to data. then opened up thum drive and copied data to data with winfax closed. when that not work i copied winfax to winfax, no work and went to symantec to symantec. Now when I go to program files click symantec there is a new symantec file again where you see winfax file. when i click winfax i see new winfax file where you see data file. I think I should delete these new files. I also looked on the thumbdrive I backed up files and see in data file a ton of fxd and fxr files that are recent to 2/2012 but winfax is only showing up to 3/2011. Should I move the information from thumbdrive to desktop and then copy data to data? Since I dont know I REALLY NEED YOUR HELP.
Please advise correct way to restore

[Administrator]

it looks like you have duplicate folders copied in the wrong locations.
you can try this:

1. shut down winfax, the winfax controller and all other applications. You can shut down WinFax by using the End All Tasks option in Winfax Tools. You don’t need to end the Port Starter or WfxSwtch program if you are asked about this.

2. In WinFax Tools, Click on the WinFax Info button. This will show you the correct data path where you default data is located. Take note of this location, for you it should be C:Program FilesSymantecWinFaxData but it could be somewhere else depending how you initially setup WinFax.

3. go to your Program Files/Symantec/WinFax/Data folder on your hard drive, or to the location that was listed in WinFax Info in the step above. Now rename this “Data” folder to “DataOld” or “Data-04-10-2012” , it doesn’t matter what you call it, but it is important that it is different than the original “Data” name. If you get an error about file in use, then you didn’t properly shut down WinFax.

4. Now go to your Program Files/Symantec/WinFax folder, copy the entire folder “Data” from your thumb drive to this folder. You should now have a folder called “Data” underneath Program Files/Symantec/WinFax.

5. In WinFax Tools, click on Start Controller. This should start the Controller. You can now open the Message Manager. Hopefully your data from the thumbdrive is now displayed properly in WinFax.

[paulcarter]

just got this alittle late but what I did was remove the data file from winfax then copied data file from thumbdrive to winfax file and problem solved. then I deleted the extra symantec and winfax file that I had previously copied from thumbdrive to same files. As a finishing touch I rebuilt phonebooks and logs with winfax tool. I do wish I would have backed up phonelogs first before remove and replaceing data file, being human I forgot. All data appears fully restored now from when I backed it up.

[Administrator]

glad to hear that worked, in the future you should rename the existing data folder before copying data from another folder. you should never merge winfax data because it will overwrite existing files/data and leave you with orphaned fax files. Also renaming the data folder (not deleting it) allows you to recover the original data in the event you forgot something, like a phonebook 🙂

[Author]

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