How do I migrate from older Chronos products? : Chronos

IMPORTANT NOTE: The below article was sent to all Chronos customers on our mailing list prior to the release of OS X Lion (10.7) in early summer 2011. We sent this important article to all of our customers at that time because we had learned that some older versions of our products were no longer going to be able to run on OS X 10.7 and later. As described below, it's often necessary to be able to run older versions of Chronos products in order to migrate your data to the latest version of these products. This presents a major problem for customers who no longer have a computer with an earlier version of OS X installed. We therefore wanted to warn customers about this hurdle before they installed OS X 10.7 or later without migrating their data first.

If you’re still using one of the below listed products, then we highly recommend that you upgrade NOW before it becomes considerably more complicated or impossible to upgrade:

• StickyBrain 1.x, 2.x, 3.x or 4.x

• SOHO Notes 5.x, 6.x, or 7.x

• SOHO Organizer 5.x, 6.x, or 7.x

• Personal Organizer 4.x

• Group Organizer 5.x

As you likely know, Apple will release OS X Lion sometime in July 2011. The following products will NOT work under OS X Lion:

• StickyBrain 3.x or 4.x

• SOHO Notes 5.x, 6.x, or 7.x

• SOHO Organizer 5.x, 6.x, or 7.x

because the OpenBase database engine upon which they rely will not run under OS X Lion. While StickyBrain 1.x/2.x, Personal Organizer 4.x, and Group Organizer 4.x might run under OS X Lion, we cannot guarantee that they will run without problems due to their age. If you’re using StickyBrain 1.x to 4.x or SOHO Notes 5.x to 7.x, you’ll want to upgrade to SOHO Notes 9.x. Likewise, if you’re using SOHO Organizer 5.x to 7.x, Personal Organizer 4.x, or Group Organizer 4.x, you’ll want to upgrade to SOHO Organizer 9.x.

Unfortunately, there is one more catch… SOHO Notes 9.x and SOHO Organizer 9.x cannot directly upgrade your old data because these versions no longer use the OpenBase database engine. This means you have to first upgrade your data to SOHO Notes 7.x or SOHO Organizer 7.x. Then you have to upgrade your data to SOHO Notes 8.x or SOHO Organizer 8.x. Why is this a problem? Since SOHO Notes 7.x and SOHO Organizer 7.x do not run under OS X Lion, it means you need to upgrade to SOHO Notes 9.x or SOHO Organizer 9.x BEFORE you upgrade your computer to OS X Lion.

Upgrade Service Fee

For the past 18 years, Chronos has helped answer customer questions about upgrading their data for FREE no matter the age of the product they’re using. Unfortunately, we’ve lately found that it takes 2 to 3 hours on average per customer to help a customer through the various issues that arise from complexities like database engine incompatibilities with different operating system versions, etc. As you might imagine, this reduces our ability to respond in a timely manner to support requests from other customers.

With the forthcoming release of OS X Lion, these conversion issues will become even more complex and time-consuming. We therefore encourage you to make the leap now if you think you’ll ever want to migrate your data from older versions of the software. We will still offer FREE technical help for your upgrade questions through July 31, 2011. After this date, you’ll need to purchase a $100 technical support incident for any data migration questions or problems that you you might have. SPECIAL NOTE: Starting in January 2013, Chronos can no longer guarantee that it can migrate your data even if you purchase a technical support incident because our support representative's computers no longer run certain older versions of OS X, so please check with us first.

Instructions for converting from StickyBrain 1.x or 2.x to SOHO Notes 9

SOHO Notes 9 is unable to directly convert your data from StickyBrain 1.x thru 2.x. Instead you can choose from three different approaches which involve more steps:

Copy/Paste. You can manually copy and paste the data from each note in StickyBrain to a new note in SOHO Notes.
Shortcuts. You can use the SOHO Notes shortcuts feature to quickly grab the contents from each note in StickyBrain to create a new note in SOHO Notes. For more information on Shortcuts launch SOHO Notes and choose Help > SOHO Notes Help.
Use Version 5. You can use SOHO Notes 5.x to directly convert your StickyBrain 1.x or 2.x notes. You then need to convert your 5.x notes to version 7.x, then to version 8.x, and finally to version 9.x as described below.

Follow the below steps to use version 5 to convert your StickyBrain 1.x or 2.x notes:

Follow these instructions to convert your StickyBrain data to SOHO Notes 5.x.
Download and install SOHO Notes 7.08 (even if you're a SOHO Organizer user). You'll be asked to enter in a license key, but you can ignore and just run as a 30 day trial since you won't actually be using this version beyond that time frame.
Launch SOHO Notes 7.08.
Download and install the latest version of SOHO Notes 8.x (8.57 at the time of this writing).
Launch SOHO Notes 8.x and follow the onscreen instructions to convert your version 7 database to version 8.
Download and install SOHO Notes 9.
Launch SOHO Notes 9 and follow the onscreen instructions to convert your version 8 database to version 9.