Poor bandwidth, difficulty migrating

Question

This team reports that they can’t proceed with the migration because after the step where they fill out the webform, they return to Paratext and it can’t make the connection. I don’t know if it is timing out or what. Is there a way to preregister the project which might enable it to make the connection?

Answer 1

There is no way to have Paratext know a project is registered without using the Internet, sorry. They can do an offline migration, but the project will be considered unregistered until they can connect to the internet.

Comments

Internet improved and they succeeded. But I am still concerned about other situations. You mention an offline migration, but that isn’t possible with a shared project. I was just thinking that there might be a way to pre-register a project, since many projects were pre-registered by their organizations some time ago.

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You can do an offline migration of a shared project by telling Paratext not to access the Internet by disabling it in Tools > Options (or, slightly more difficult, by having Paratext completely fail to contact the Internet).

Answer 2

Would this also be a way that one could rename a project, without having to do the conversion in Paratext 7.6? Basically, turn off the internet in Tools>Options, and then offline migrate, convert the project, delete the initially migrated project, and then register the converted/renamed project?
I tried to test this, and all appeared to work well (I didn’t actually register the project). I am trying to figure out a good way to help people rename improperly named projects, without registering the improper name, and without needing to have them install Paratext 7.6.
Thanks
BEH

Comments

Yes, that process should work just fine for renaming a project.

Just remember that there is, then, no corresponding project in Paratext 7, so there is no way to re-do the migration and get the same project as a result (i.e. every time Convert Project is used, it will create a new project with a different internal ID). This means, even if you re-converted to the same project name, none of the Paratext servers would “see” it as the same project as the original conversion.

Most of the time, this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you are planning on pre-registering the project before a final migration or something like that, it wouldn’t work.

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Thanks, that is good information to think about.

Answer 3

Another issue is if in poor bandwidth the team will be able to do the first send/receive, since it means uploading the entire project to the Paratext 8 server. Often upload speeds are slower than download speeds.

I helped some PNG colleagues migrate because of this issue. They added me as admin to their P7 project, I did the registration and migration and they received the new project from the 8 server. This process could be blocked by pre-registration in 8, because the 8 project won’t have the “new” admin listed as a team member, and cannot register it as a new project. To get past this someone would have to delete the preregistered project from the registry, or add the new admin to it (if it is possible to add a new team member directly to the registry without using Paratext).