Opinion

[Ben_H]

Hi Emil,
Thank you for replying and letting me know that removing all the unused old local devices worked for you. If you run into that "read only category" issue with your current database, please let me know. Thank you.

Ben
ACD Systems.

[Emil]

Hi Ben_H,

1.) You said "The Ultimate 8 db is 2.8Gb in size w/o thumbnails from 280,000 catalogued items," but does your Ultimate 8 database actually have any thumbnail database files attached to it (e.g. Thumb1.dbf, Thumb1.fpt, Thumb2.dbf, and Thumb2.fpt, etc)? Or did you manually remove the thumbnail database files from the Ultimate 8 database before the database conversion in Pro 2020? Or did you remove all the thumbnails through Database Maintenance in Ultimate 8?

This db was equipped with all thumb*.* files. I just didn't count their file sizes. I also have other dbs with empty thumb*.* files.

2.) You mentioned that "photos mode was not filled" and "missing most thumbnails." However, the thumbnails that did appear, were they the ones you just recently browsed in Pro 2020?

Yepp.

3.) When you go through the database conversion in Pro 2020, did you select "Rebuild thumbnail, EXIF and IPTC data for local images?" or "Optimize database files after convert?"

Because many items were located on offline media at that time (over night job in vacated office), "Rebuild Thumbnails ..." was off, "Optimize .." was on.

4.) During the conversion, did you see any drive mapping dialog?

No. All installations of AC are on the same machine. Most catalogued items are located on network shares.

5.) During the conversion, do you recall which step lasted several days in the progress dialog?

Import from temporary database. Afair it was "removing excluded objects" (or similar)

I'm currently rerunning the process with another db with all media online. Standby and hibernation is switched off for all machines involved.

Thanks for your attention.

[Edit]
Phew! That wasn't easy, but finally it worked.

In ACu8
DB maintenance and delete all unused old local devices
DB optimization run twice

In ACp13
Convert into brand new db w/o db optimization, w/o recreation of thumbnails and meta data.

After precisely 5:54 hours it finally finished! (Time difference of oldest and youngest file in db.)

Sizes of new db: 23,6GB (all files), 295,000 items

Had to start conversion twice, though. First time machine crashed after an hour, w/o dmp file in %appdata%, sorry.
Still need to check if all items are attached to their categories. read this, and this.

Not sure if I'm going to use this db though, tons of typos in the keywords master list :-)

BTW. Met a nice girl in the lonely city park while waiting :-)

[Ben_H]

Hi Emil,
Thank you for reporting this issue. I have a few questions for you regarding this database conversion issue.

1.) You said "The Ultimate 8 db is 2.8Gb in size w/o thumbnails from 280,000 catalogued items," but does your Ultimate 8 database actually have any thumbnail database files attached to it (e.g. Thumb1.dbf, Thumb1.fpt, Thumb2.dbf, and Thumb2.fpt, etc)? Or did you manually remove the thumbnail database files from the Ultimate 8 database before the database conversion in Pro 2020? Or did you remove all the thumbnails through Database Maintenance in Ultimate 8?

2.) You mentioned that "photos mode was not filled" and "missing most thumbnails." However, the thumbnails that did appear, were they the ones you just recently browsed in Pro 2020?

3.) When you go through the database conversion in Pro 2020, did you select "Rebuild thumbnail, EXIF and IPTC data for local images?" or "Optimize database files after convert?"

4.) During the conversion, did you see any drive mapping dialog?

5.) During the conversion, do you recall which step lasted several days in the progress dialog?

Finally, the QA team in ACD Systems does test database conversion with real large databases and real images multiple times during the development cycle. We are also very interested in finding out the issue you are experiencing. Thank you.

Regards,

Ben
ACD Systems

[Emil]

The job finally was finished, but as expected the photos mode was not filled, it's displaying totally wrong amounts and missing most thumbnails. Do I need to report this bug once more? Imho, database conversion from a pre photos mode version never worked.

Trying to convert an open db isn't a good idea at all, many changes to the db are written after the app vanishes from the screen. You need to run the task manager to see if AC has closed the db and terminated. This is another annoying behaviour.

[GusPanella]

I had something like this happen to me once. In my case, I had the previous version of ACD open as I was trying to install/convert into the new version.

I attributed it to the ACDs multitasking weaknesses or possibly somewhat old database engine.

[Emil]

If a function needs several days to finish it's pretty useless.

Since yesterday morning an installation of Pro 2020 is converting an Ultimate 8 database. Since several hours it doesn't do anything else then read 1KB chunks from asset.dbf. The Ultimate 8 db is 2.8Gb in size w/o thumbnails from 280,000 catalogued items. No AC-keywords, no collections.

Does any one from the QA team ever use AC with real live file bases? It's so easy to create a test file base with millions of items occupying just a few MB on the disk.