Allday Consulting's Peachtree and QuickBooks Support Boards

I have been called upon to recover the data from a hard drive that holds peachtree accounting files. Please advise on the file extensions one might find througn the differernt versions of this software.

Peachtree does not use "a file extension" for the Company files per se, except for Backup files. Those will end in .PTB. It stores each "company" as a folder full of a number of files.

Normally, you will look something like this:

c:\Program Files\Sage Software\Peachtree\Company\

Older versions may not include "Sage Software", or may use "c:\Peachw\Company\".

"Company" is the "datapath" (this term may also appear in error messages; it's also in the .INI files stored in c:\windows -- look for a file called something like PAW013.ini or PCW014.ini or PTX150.ini, etc, if you have trouble locating the datapath in Explorer, it's a plain text ini file with plenty of REM'd lines to explain its contents). For example, PT 2007 Complete's ini is called PCW014.ini. PT 2008 Quantum's ini is called PTX015.ini

All of the "Companies" will be within the datapath, and will appear as subfolders. For example, "BCS" is the Bellwether sample company. Anything with an ! and/or _ in the name is just part of Peachtree's file system, you can safely ignore those. User-made companies will have truncated (8 character or smaller) names, usually taken from the first 3 letters of words in the actual company name, with a maximum of 7 letters used for the actual name. For instance, a company called Allday Consulting Inc might show up as "allconi". If a company has been Restored from a backup at least once, one more letter will be added (still 8 maximum) which starts at "a" and increments from there -- Allday's 5th restored backup might show up as "allconie".

If you have a PTB/Backup of the appropriate date, use that to transport the file. If not, ZIP up the entire folder named for the company you want and unzip it in the destination Datapath. Make sure that the result is ...\Company\allconi\, not ...\Company\allconi\allconi\. Remember, Peachtree must be fully installed, updated, and operational on the target location before doing this. If you need to verify which version the data sets are for, look for a file called version.txt within the company's individual folder. A Company opened under PT 2008 will not function in PT 2007 nor anything else prior to 2008, and so on. pt2008 is version 18, pt2007 is version 17, etc. These numbers may be different from what's in the INI files (just to be confusing).

If worst comes to worst and you just can't track the folders down, run a Search for "Company.dat" and go to that folder location.

Note that, if you need to delete any files in the folder for whatever reason, anything ending in PTL, LCK, or DDF can be safely deleted; PT will make new ones as they are needed. PTB's should probably be saved separately (no need to ZIP them, they're already highly compressed), where they're located is not important.