Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I have several machines that were previously running Lotus Notes French R5.011 version. I recently tried to upgrade the machines to the Multilingual version of Notes 6.5.2 and was shocked to discover that it overwrote the entire C:\Lotus\Notes\Data directory. In fact it completely overwrote the entire C:\Lotus directory and rewrote the users Notes.ini file. It overwrote everything as if it were installing new for the first time.

I also noticed this when I tried upgrading a machine that had the Notes, Designer and Admin clients installed with a install version which only had the Notes client.

What is going on here? In my 10 years of Notes experience I’ve never seen the install of Notes overwrite the key files such as names.nsf, desktop5.dsk, bookmarks.nsf, etc…

Has this happened to anyone else?

I think IBM/LOTUS has a big problem here.

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Subject: Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

What language version of Notes do you use? We will look into this.

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Subject: RE: Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

We upgraded from Notes 5.0.11 french to 6.5.2 multilingual. The goal is to have the french language running on the machine. I’m a IBM Passport advantage customer and downloaded the multilingual version from the passport web site. I’ve been able to reproduce this twice now on two seperate machines, so there is something wrong in the install code.

I just chose all the default for the installation and Notes 5.0.11 was installed in the standard c:\lotus\notes directory.

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Subject: RE: Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

We could not reproduce your problem in the next test cases.

Language : French

R5.0.11 NotesClient → 6.5.2 NotesClient

R5.0.11 NotesClient → 6.5.2 AllClients

R5.0.11 AllClients → 6.5.2 NotesClient

R5.0.11 AllClients → 6.5.2 AllClients

The design of names.nsf and bookmark.nsf has been replaced with R6 template, but the data in names.nsf still exists.

The database created based on R5 template still exists after upgrading to 652.

You said, “I’ve been able to reproduce this twice now on two seperate machines”. Please let us know your steps to reproduce.

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Subject: Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

Notes client installer doesn’t install names.nsf, desktop5.dsk, bookmarks.nsf, etc… period. The Notes client setup program creates these files if they don’t exist when you first launch Notes. It does upgrade the design of these databases from the new 6.x templates.

Upgrading a 5.x version of Notes with a 6.5.x version of Notes is a tested configuration. If there was a generic problem with this scenario it would have been found.

You should open a support incident to determine what in your environment is going on.

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Subject: RE: Notes 6.5 Upgrade Overwrites the Notes/Data Directory

It may be a tested, but its not tested good enough. Somehow the multilingual version overwrites the entire Lotus directory. Thus the reason why those key user files are removed.

It doesn’t appear that IBM has tested this properly.