Import/convert old database

Genealogy
21

Thanks, that’s good information to cross-reference!

@ennoborg
The page you originally noted as being inaccurate has been modified. (Other suggestions welcome.)

It is likely that it will require some effort to build a basic recovery workflow page. And then grow it to be more comprehensive. (When a looming major upgrade isn’t drawing so much focus.) The recent evolution away from BSDDB will probably become another key compatibilty turning point.

(We can’t expect Serge to always be available and willing to abandon his personal pursuits to recover old data. Especially when he also contibutes to the community in so many areas.)

1 Like
22

I tried a lot of different live CD’s, and got a hint from Serge behind the scenes, and here are a few findings:

  1. Live CD version 3 seems to be corrupt. When I write that to a thumb drive, it won’t start, and when I try to mount the ISO in Windows 11, Windows tells me that it’s not a valid ISO.

  2. When I try CD version 4, with Gramps 3.0.1, I can select the GRDB file, but it’s useless, because it’s always followed by a message telling me that there was an error opening some file in /tmp, which seems to be a copy of that GRDB file.

  3. I can read the file(s) that Willem sent me with Gramps 2.0, and export that to Gramps XML. And although that schema is quite old, it can be read with 5.1, so the hurdle is the DB format, just like Nick wrote.

Working with the live CD’s in VirtualBox is hard, because they don’t support file sharing with the host, because of software incompatibilities. Using cloud services to get around that is also close to impossible, because old browsers don’t support the security layers used by modern services.

1 Like
23

This is what I used. I share a directory between the host and the VM.
I use VirtualBox 6.1.38
I the VM config, I have a shared folder defined like that:

Vbox.shared
Vbox.shared887×207 23 KB

And in the /etc/fstab of the VM I mount this folder with:
VM.fstab
VM.fstab752×146 22.5 KB

I hope this help

2 Likes
24

I just saw that I left out the word old. What I meant is that with live CD version 2, I can’t install the VBox AddOns, so file sharing is impossible with that. I’m using VirtualBox 7.0.6.

It does work with newer live CD’s.

25

Follow-up: I found that the easiest way is to use the live CD version 4, which works well with VirtualBox file sharing, and then replace the installed Gramps 3.0 with 2.2, downloaded via the host.

The Firefox version on that CD is too old to browse the web in a safe way.

An alternative would be to use a Mint (or ubuntu) version that is old enough to run Gramps 2.2, and modern enough to visit the web.

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The alternative way you mention is, as far as I tried, impossible because the needed repositories for python are no longer available.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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The live CD version 4 is based on a very old version of ubuntu, 8.04, made in 2008, and that has the right version of Python built-in.

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