Copy X7 .dat files into X8?

[babyleon]

When my Pro X7 refused to start after the recent Windows update, I tried removing the suggested files. Still did not load. I removed ALL the update files from that date. Still did not load. I use Premiere Pro a lot these days but I still have some projects in VS, one of which spans 12 years of video files spread among about 10 external hard drives. That project is a Birds of Belize DVD which I update with some new footage every year. In that project I have library folders for clips on all those drives and it is very important to me to be able to find those clips for annual project updates..

I copied and saved my .dat files to another drive and tried re-installing X7. Even then, the installation did not complete due to a “newer version of Quicktime” that was installed on my computer. “Uninstalling that did nothing and I finally deleted the entire Quicktime folder in my program files. Once I successfully re-installed X7 it still did not load. I gave up and bought the upgrade to X8.5. That installed successfully and started.

I have the copies of all the .dat folders from my X7 installation but when I copy them into the appropriate “18.0/en” folders, they still don’t show in X8.

Am I missing something or am I screwed? Thanks!

[BrianCee]

Well not completely screwed - all your videos are still on your computer in the folders you put them in - yes you cannot access them through a library panel which may be a bit of a pain - but it will not take very many minutes to populate the new libraries in X8 from the actual video files

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[asik1]

How did you "copy" ? have you exported the library? and import it?

[babyleon]

Thank you for the reply. I know all my original unedited video files are still intact and available on my various external hard drives. But if by repopulate you mean to go into 5TB of video files from 11 years spread over many external drives and find those perhaps 20GB of clips that were in the X7 folders and put them in the X8 folders, that will take months if not years of tedious review and re-evaluation to complete. Is there no way to get the saved .dat files from X7 recognized by X8? Otherwise I am indeed totally screwed....

[babyleon]

I copied the .dat files to another drive using the copy function in Windows Explorer. I was not able to export them from X7 as I could not get X7 to run.

[BrianCee]

Sorry babyleon - got to ask because it's not clear from your post

you are copying the .dat files from within the X7 folders to exactly the same place in the X8 folders - not just copying them to an external drive. ?


...

[asik1]

Lets hope that your 17.0 folder is still intact after all this MS chaos.
If so you better grab all of it and duplicate it with different name as 17-Archive.
As you say you have 20GB with hundreds clips, than your VS_AllMediaView.dat file should be very very large.
Did periodically backed up your library?

[babyleon]

Brian, sorry for not adequately describing what I did. I copied the X7 .dat files to an external drive to preserve them when I re-installed X7 on my primary drive. When I still could not get X7 to run and installed X8 on my primary drive, I copied the X7 .dat files to the X8 18.0 folder on the primary drive.

[babyleon]

asik1, my VS-Video.dat file size from X7 is 152,240 KB. I don't believe the MS updates corrupted any of the library files before I copied them. I do weekly backup of my primary C drive but I am not sure I want to try to restore the whole thing for just the X7 files especially as it was not working even after I removed the culprit MS updates - I also fear something else might be affected in that process..... Besides, I have used the method of copying .dat files in previous installation of VS upgrades (I have been using VS for a long time and that was the only way to preserve them in other earlier upgrades). I think when I upgraded to X7 from X5, I did the export function for my existing libraries. But since I was not able to start X7, I could not do the export.