Knowledge Base

Modified installation to run as a service and data is missing

Question

I changed my PingPlotter installation to run as a Windows Service, and now all of my settings and data are gone. How do I get them back?

Answer

Due to the differences in the way PingPlotter operates as a Windows Service and as a standalone application, the data stores and settings for each are are kept in separate locations. There isn't currently a built in option to copy data over from an application to service instance. We can, however, migrate this manually by following a few simple steps.

Solution

Note: PingPlotter should not be running (application or service) while attempting the following steps.

If we have data in our Application instance that we'd like to carry over to our new Service instance, we can easily do so by copying the data store (sessions.ppdata) from our Application data directory "%localappdata%\PingPlotter 5" to our Service data directory "%programdata%\PingPlotter 5". If there are settings that also need to be migrated, this can be done by copying the "client_settings" and "server_settings" to the new directory along with the sessions.ppdata file. Once we have moved the sessions.ppdata file to the new directory, we can launch PingPlotter and all session information should be intact.