Transferring MLS Installation to New Computer

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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sammythesm
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Transferring MLS Installation to New Computer

#1

Post by sammythesm »

Sorry if this sound a little faithless, but are the instructions for transferring MLS to another computer (found http://tech.lds.org/wiki/MLS_installation_and_repair) correct?

The instructions say to:
1. do a fresh installation of MLS on the new computer
2. overwrite it with the files from old installation
3. then open MLS and restore from a backup.
4. then call MLS support and reset the security token for the computer

Is it just me or does this sound like more work than necessary? It seems like I should be able to just restore from a backup to a clean installation. What benefit do I gain by transferring the files from the old MLS installation??
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aebrown
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Location: Draper, Utah

#2

Post by aebrown »

sammythesm wrote:Sorry if this sound a little faithless, but are the instructions for transferring MLS to another computer (found http://tech.lds.org/wiki/MLS_installation_and_repair) correct?

The instructions say to:
1. do a fresh installation of MLS on the new computer
2. overwrite it with the files from old installation
3. then open MLS and restore from a backup.
4. then call MLS support and reset the security token for the computer

Is it just me or does this sound like more work than necessary? It seems like I should be able to just restore from a backup to a clean installation. What benefit do I gain by transferring the files from the old MLS installation??
That was the required procedure back when the financial statements were not included in the backups. If you didn't copy all the files, and simply restored a backup onto a clean installation of MLS, you would lose all your financial statements (and saved forms, too, if I recall correctly).

However, the MLS backup files now include all that information, so a simple restore will get you up and running again. However, you do lose something if that's all you do -- you will lose the automatic backups that were made by MLS on the old computer. So if you ever need to go back to one of those, you will not be able to. There's a low probability that you'll need an old automatic backup, and within a month or so they would be overwritten anyway, but if you want maximum safety, you would still want to copy all the old files.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
sammythesm
Member
Posts: 225
Joined: Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:50 pm
Location: Texas, United States
Contact:

#3

Post by sammythesm »

Thanks, aebrown! That was the confirmation I needed to move forward.

The restore from a backup to a new computer worked like a charm. All PDF documents/statements are still there. I did take the extra precaution to copy over the data-backup directory, which held all of the locally created backups for MLS. So we have those now for several years.

I still had to call SLC to reset the security token, but that was a 2 minute call. It felt like a much cleaner transfer than moving all the files, especially on a WinXP to Win7 migration.

Perhaps we should update the wiki with this new (easier? better?) way to do the migration.
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