Re-installing Topicscape on a new computer

This process also applies to those times when you decide to clean your PC up by re-installing Windows.

If you have been using Topicscape for a while, and built many Topicscapes that you treasure and want to transfer over to a new PC, here's what you can do.

You may have to adjust these guidelines to suit your computer's specific installation.

Save your Topicscapes, associated files and license first

1. Copy the whole of the My Topicscapes folder to a safe, reliable external place - say a USB thumb drive, external hard disk or network drive. If you have Topicscape folders and 3DT files elsewhere, copy those as well.

Consider making a second copy on DVD.

2. Consider if you have any files linked-to from your Topicscapes, but external to them - in other words, occurrences where you chose "Link" instead of "Move" or "Copy" when first bringing the file into Topicscape - copy all those external files as well, and note which folder they were in, because Topicscape will expect them to have the same path when you try to open them once everything has been re-installed. I expect you'll be making other arrangements to save and restore files that Topicscape doesn't know about, anyway.

3. Copy your original license email from us as well - you'll need it later.

Get Topicscape set up in its new environment

4. Once your PC is set up again, ready to go, download the latest Topicscape Pro and skins installers from the usual place.

5. Install Topicscape, install skins. Run Topicscape. As you have re-installed Windows, you will start up as a trial user, so you need your license email - drag the license file to your Windows Desktop.

6. Go to Topicscape's Help menu, and select License Loader . . .

Restore your Topicscapes

7. Overwrite the new My Topicscapes folder with the one from the external location mentioned in 1. Also copy the other files and folders, if any, saved in steps 1 and 2.

A word about backups

You may be doing this re-installation because of a major failure, and that may mean that steps 1 to 3 are impossible. Then you'll be able to re-install Topicscape, but will have suffered a catastrophic loss of past work.

Making periodic backups to external drives, DVDs or USB sticks will greatly ease the pain of such an event. The cost now of an enormous hard disk that can be simply plugged into a USB port is tiny, compared with the cost of re-constructing important reference and planning information in your Topicscape and elsewhere.