Andrew Tuline

If you’ve put many hours into your songs, then it’s totally on YOU to maintain adequate backups of your SongbookPro Database.

User: Well, I run Sync, so that’s my backup.

Syncing or Backing up to a single file on Dropbox/Google Drive is about as minimum a backup as you can get. If you mess things up, and then sync, well, that’s not much of a backup.

On Backups:

In the IT world, there is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, where there’s (at least) 3 copies of data on at least two different media and at least 1 is offsite (i.e. the Cloud).

Case in point:

I accidentally deleted one of my songs, which is easy to do in SongbookPro. Since I keep multiple copies of my Songbook Pro .SBP file, I was able to find/restore that old song from a previous backup. Since my songs are in ChordPro text format, my SongbookPro database is small, and easy to backup to email on a regular basis. Otherwise, I could save to a storage device and provide a unique name for each database file.

On Version Control: One of the very cool things about Ultimate Guitar is that when you edit a (Chords) song, it keeps previous versions of that song, which you can revert back to.SongbookPro, on the other hand, supports Sync and Backups, but it doesn’t support Version Control (not that I would expect it at this price). I make a poor man’s version control system by keeping multiple backups of my .SBP database.

Conclusion:

At an absolute minimum you should at the very least least Sync or (preferably) make a Backup of your .SBP database.In my case, I have multiple onsite/offsite backups, and occasionally export my entire database as zipped .CHO and .PDF files in case SongbookPro goes south on us. I’ve put FAR too many hours into my songs to lose them as a result of clumsy fingers, failed devices or even abandonware.

User: <application> doesn’t work anymore. What’s wrong?

I’ve seen this quality of request on several technical forums over the years. Please, please, please, provide a reasonable level of detail such as:

• What platform you’re working on, iOS, Android, Windows or even SBP Manager.
• What steps can someone take to try and reproduce your problem. Every click counts.
• Details such as PDF files or text files or Word documents.
• Word documents typically use proportional fonts and are messy to import.
• Sync can have significant problems, especially with folders and setlists. Again, please provide details.
• How have you configured Sync and/or backup?
• Are you using multiple devices?
• How are you importing?
• Where did you buy the app and are you using the same credentials?
• Did you read the manual?
• Keep it clear and concise.

I could go on, but ONE LINER support requests are of little to no help in problem resolution. If you end up providing more information later, please edit/update the original request, not just buried somewhere in the comments. Also, if you’ve solved the issue, please let the community how it was solved.