Setting up FM on a USB drive

[Sheldon]

Hi Mark,
I am having a problem setting up Fund Manager to run from a USB drive. I followed all the instructions re the installation, starting FM from the new location, selecting Options/General Preferences/Data/Portable mode. I then opened one of my portfolios that contains all my investments, and using File/File Operations/Set Data Location, I entered the new USB location. Everything worked fine and all my .dat files were copied over to the USB location. I then opened another portfolio, this one containing only a portion of the investments that were contained in the first portfolio, and set the data location to the same new location as the first one. When I checked the .dat files in the new location, all the ones that were in the second portfolio had new additional .dat files created for them (IE ABX.dat and ABX_1.dat) even though they were sourced from the the same ABX.dat file that currently exists on the hard drive. Isn't FM supposed to only create new .dat files when they come from a different location?

Thanx,
Sheldon

[Mark]

Hi Sheldon,

In this case, since you moved that investment file before, when you opened the 2nd copy, it didn't know that this investment had already been moved. This generally works best if you only have a single *.mm4 portfolio file. Since you can now have an unlimited number of sub-portfolios with unlimited hierarchy, there usually isn't a need for multiple portfolio files. If you want to keep using multiple portfolio files, you might be better off in this case manually moving all your data files from your hard drive to the USB data folder, and then opening from there.

If you are interested in consolidating multiple portfolio files into a single one with sub-portfolios, see the Portfolio Editor tutorial:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/tuto ... video.html