If you backed up your Historian™ cabinet with an Full Backup or Incremental Backup, you can recover it exactly as it was saved! This is because a Full Backup is a snapshot of your cabinet in that exact moment, and Incremental Backups when pieced together are your entire cabinet as you have been working in it. Follow these steps if you need to rescue your memories and continue working in your Media Library.
Step 1: Open Historian
- Open Historian and log in if prompted
- On the Welcome page, click “Recover Cabinet” (in Historian 4 this will be labeled “Recover Vault”).
- You will get a pop-up window that requires a 2-step process before it will let you click OK and continue with the recover process.
Step 2: Choose the New Cabinet Location
- In the section labeled “New location for the recovered cabinet”, click the three dots ( … ).
- Browse to and select an empty folder where you want the recovered cabinet to go. This will be where you continue to open your main copy from moving forward, so make sure it's a spot you will remember!
💡Tip: While you can save it almost anywhere, here are four locations we suggest:
A. Default location C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\My cabinet
B. Pictures local folder C:\Users\your username\Pictures\My cabinet
C. Documents local folder C:\Users\your username\Documents\My cabinet
D. External hard drive connected to the computer
Step 3: Select the Backup File(s)
- Click the button to "Hard Drive or CD/DVD" to recover from.
- Browse to where the your backup folder is saved. The default names are "Backup100-xxxx" for incremental or "FullBackup102-xxxx" for full.
- If you are recovering from an Incremental Backup click into the most recent "Backup100-xxxx" folder and select the "Backup" contentx file. If you are recovering a Full Backup click into the "FullBackup102-0001" folder and select the "FullBackup" contentx file.
Step 4: Recover
- Once both areas are correctly selected (new cabinet location and incremental or full backup file), the OK button will become active.
- Click OK to begin recovery!
- After the backup completes you may get a pop-up like this one, which means there is missing information still needing to be recovered. This is normal for recovering from an Incremental Backup since there are multiple backups that were made. Simply repeat the selection from step 3 above to continue selecting the rest of your Backup contentx files.
⚠️ Important Tips During Recovery
- Do NOT let the computer go to sleep or shut down during recovery, as it will interrupt the process and you will need to start over.
- Once done, the new cabinet will appear in the folder you selected for Step 2.
Looking for other ways to back up your Historian cabinet? You can read this article for other ways to keep your memories safe!