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ND6 TIPS
Some lessons learned from Notes 6 installation
By Mick Moignard

By now you've probably installed a Notes 6 client and are having fun working with it. Did you notice a few strange, unexpected, and unwanted things that the installation does? Did you make a backup of your key Notes files before you started? Let me tell you a story with some morals you may find valuable, even if you're still just thinking about installing Notes 6.

Help, I've lost my Help files!
Since R5, Notes has stored Help files in the Help subdirectory. I think R4 put them in the Doc subdirectory. As I used R5 and made copies and replicas of various Notes documentation database, I put them in Help too, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then I installed Notes 6 and indexed the Notes 6 Help files. I decided to re-index my R5 Help files, and they were gone! I looked some more, and the whole directory was empty. Empty, that is, of all but the Notes 6 files. All my documentation databases were gone, leaving just the .ft fulltext directories! Oh bugger, I thought.

One good thing, I suppose, is that most of them were quite old and many I hadn't looked at for a while, so the enforced cleanup had some merits. But that isn't really the point.

Laboriously, I re-created replicas of at least the R5 files from an R5 server and re-indexed them. These are the morals I learned from this experience:

  • Moral 1: Don't keep your own files in the Help subdirectory in R5 or Notes 6 ever again.

  • Moral 2: Make a backup of the Notes data directory before an upgrade.

Watch your Modems directory, too!
Then I tried dialing a remote server. Modem File Error! I looked at the Ports setup, and it couldn't find my nicely crafted personal modem file, which used ATX1 to avoid waiting for a dial tone. Oh bloody bugger, I whispered. Yes, the Notes 6 client install deletes all the contents of the Modems directory too, before replacing it with the new content.

Fortunately, I also spotted that the new modem setup dialog has a checkbox for Wait for Dial Tone, so I was up again quickly. But that's not really the point either.

Here's what I learned from this experience:

  • Moral 1: Make safe copies of any custom modem files as soon as you've tested them. Don't leave your only copy in the Modems subdirectory.

  • Moral 2: Make a backup of the Notes data directory before an upgrade.

Know your installer
You'd probably think that by now I'd have learned my lesson. Well, just today I downloaded the Notes 6.0.1 incremental installer from Notes.Net that had just arrived.


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