recovering Bersmith 2 files from archive?

[kiwipen]

My computer shat the bed on me a while ago, but I was able to recover some things, including my Beersmith files in Documents>Berrsmith2>Archive

The problem is that it contains 300+ files, all with names like Ar-10-14-9_37-29_12001. I think 10.14 is the date and 9.37.29 is the time. I have no clue what 12001 is. These are from what I can see by opening some of them, all my recipes and the changes I've done to them.

I had made about 30 recipes.

Is there any easy way to get my recipes back without manually opening 300+ files one at a time? I did this some time ago some of them.

Copy and paste to the Documents>Berrsmith2>Archive on my new hard drive? I don't want to mess up the new recipes I have on there now.

 

[IslandLizard]

=== [EDITS] ===

First of all, turn ON seeing filename extensions, the stuff after the "."
You'll see many are .bsmx files, Beersmith XML files basically.
You can see the contents in Notepad or Wordpad, etc.

Those "Ar-****.bsmx" files belong in the "Archive" directory, I think they are mere backups, either timed or upon saving new data. There's some correlation between their filename and date modified, but it's mostly cryptic. They may not matter.

I would save out all the recovered .bsmx files, perhaps others too, and put in some safe area/folder. You may not need many of them, but you have them if you do. Then copy the ones you need, leaving the original recovered files in place, just in case you need to redo things at some point.

I guess you have a new hard drive now. You installed Beersmith on that, so look at the folder and file structures it created. That should help telling you where things belong.

The most important user data files are in the BeerSmith2 root directory. This is most likely located in the "My Documents" folder, or wherever you pointed it too when installing.

Recipe.bsmx holds all your recipes.
There are similar files for Style, Grain, Hops, etc.
[Ignore what I wrote before about overwriting files, IOW, don't overwrite them!]

There are also 5 chronological backups of each of those files, they're sequentially numbered like this: Recipe1.bsmx, Recipe2.bsmx, etc. Grain1.bsmx, Grain2.bsmx, etc. So you can always step back in time 1-5 times if something got corrupted, screwed up, or during regular use, or you changed your mind on something, or you discovered you deleted a whole bunch of recipes or ingredients accidentally. You may not need to replace those.

I don't know how to exactly combine your old recipe file with the new one. Maybe through some import function? Or perhaps by copying the XML data from the old Recipe.bsmx file and add to the new one?

Whatever you do when manipulating data, before you change anything, make copies of the whole set first, so you can set things back to where it was if it goes south.

Hope this helps.

 

[kiwipen]

Thank you for pointing out Recipe.bsmx.

I opened it and it looks like they are all there.