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Yes, that popup window that opens looking for a .DBF file is a symptom of the problem I had. If you click cancel over and over, or just select random DBF files until it's satisfied, then it should come up with a "Alias <something> not found" message. I think that's because it cannot open the proper DBF file because access is denied. If you don't get that popup window in Safe Mode, then I would definitely look at Windows Defender as the culprit, denying access from the tmg9.exe program. See my steps above.

Glad that worked for you, Jim. There must be some background process that is preventing the restore in normal mode. I wonder if it's related to anti-virus software like mine was.

omg. I finally figured it out. My brain hurts. It ended up being a Windows Defender issue that I had no idea about. There must have been an update within the past year or so since I last used TMG, or I played with Windows Defender settings re: my Documents folder, which was blocking access to TMG and causing the errors. It's now working again with no errors and backups are working again too. Sheesh. Here's how I fixed it, in case anyone else runs into weird Visual FoxPro errors like this. (this is in Windows 10 - it may be slightly different in Windows 11 or later): Go to Windows Security (I typed Security in the Search box in Windows and clicked on Windows Security app). Click on Virus & threat protection. Click "Manage settings" link under Virus & threat protection settings Scroll down and click "Manage Controlled folder access" link under Controlled folder access. On the Ransomware protection screen, the switch under Controlled folder access was "on" for me. Click on Allow an app through Controlled folder access link. Click on the 'Add an allowed app' button and select 'Recently blocked apps' if this issue just started happening. It will show a list of apps that have been blocked, one of which should be tmg9.exe. Click on the + button next to tmg9.exe to allow access. Voila. That should fix it. Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole I really didn't want to be in. :-)

Try rebooting your computer in safe mode and then try the restore and see if that works. For my issue, I'm finding that there are messed up file permissions and tmg can't open or write to some files it created. Really weird errors, probably having to do with Visual FoxPro 9, and it seems to all be OK in safe mode. I can't even take ownership or change permissions on the files from admin or system accounts. I'll do some more digging this weekend. It just may be time to put tmg to rest and find another program.

I mess with Windows Services sometimes and disable ones I don't think I need. Maybe TMG needs certain services running? Is there a list of services it uses? --------- well, I got it running finally. I did another uninstall using REVOUninstaller and removed all registry and file entries it found. Set all Disabled services to Manual. Then rebooted in safe mode and installed again. This time it's mostly working - I was able to copy the saved Project folder into ../Documents/The Master Genealogist v9 and opened the project. The GoTo button works and I can back up the project with no errors. I then did File/Data Set Manager/Export and exported the whole project to a .GED successfully. Tried also exporting a DIF file and that crashed. Tried exporting to Microsoft Excel file and it keeps prompting for DBF files as above, looking for curselection.dbf, exp_p.dbf, exp_ppv.dbf, expss1.dbf, exp_n.dbf, exp_m.dbf. These seem to be files needed for export. These look like internal Visual FoxPro files it's looking for. So I don't know if Visual FoxPro no longer works on the current Windows versions. Maybe that's the problem. In that case, we will all need to either continue using TMG on older Windows versions, or abandon TMG and find some other software program that has the same functionality and can import the data. Or move all your data online into someone else's software/storage like Ancestry or FamilySearch or MyHeritage, which is not ideal as you lose control of your data. But that seems to be the only option going forward. Any ideas from other ex-TMG users? USGenWeb maybe? I have my data on Rootweb that I used SecondSite to format, but I think that's not updateable any more. ---------- By the way, it only seems to work in Safe Mode now. Without safe mode on, I still get lots of Visual FoxPro generated errors about dbf files, cdx files, out of space errors (I have 109GB free on the drive). I did upgrade to a SSD this year -- maybe Visual FoxPro 9 can't handle the speed of the drive?

I uninstalled TMG9, deleted The Master Genealogist folder in Program Data and in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming. I renamed it to The Master Genealogist v9 - old in My Documents folder so that a new folder would be created. Then installed it again. It installed and set up correctly, and I opened the sample project for testing. The GoTo function does not work (Search works): The Windows Explorer Open window opens and looks like it's expecting a DBF file. Selecting a file or clicking cancel repeatedly ends up with this error msg: Something happened while I was using TMG yesterday because GoTo was working fine until after I tried backing up the project and all these issues started. I also get this error when trying to back up the sample project on the fresh install: Maybe registry keys need to be reset and then another re-install? Or can anyone explain what this error means?

I am having the same issue. I'm a computer programmer, so I've tried several things to see if I can get it to work. Nothing works yet. This started when I made some changes to a project and then tried to back up the project. I got errors regarding unable to access or write to file REPEAT.CDX. So I renamed that file in the Repeat_files folder and tried again. Then got an error about unable to read files Last Backup.log and List of external exhibits.log in the Logs folder. So I renamed those and tried again. It then got all the way through backing up the project until at the end it says something about a ZIP file being in use, and it didn't create the .SQZ file (but said it completed successfully when I dismissed the error dialog). So I tried backing up without any compression. Same error message, same result. I copied all the folders and files in The Master Genealogist v9 folder to another location, then uninstalled TMG and reinstalled it again. Then when opening the fresh install, tried to restore a previous successful backup file. No luck there either. I'm getting the original poster's message: Variable 'LATEMP' is not found. 44 FRMWIZRESTORE.WIZPAGEFRAME1.PAGE1.CON.INIT I am wondering if one of the recent Windows 10 updates has broken FoxPro or something. That would be a major problem for TMG users with no recourse except to change programs, and I don't want to change to yet another genealogy program (TMG is #4 for me since I started in 1990s). Is anyone still supporting TMG at all? Is the source code available? Maybe I could at least debug it for now. I an fluent in databases and C#, Python, VB, and can learn any language. --------- Update: After reinstalling v9.05, I was able to restore the previous backup SQZ file and open the program. I immediately tried to do a backup of the restored project again, but am still receiving the error I was getting before doing all this. I have no idea what this error means. There are no other processes dealing with ZIP files I can see on my PC. When I click OK, I get this, but there is no new SQZ file in Backups folder or any new log files in Logs folder:

I am having the same issue. I'm a computer programmer, so I've tried several things to see if I can get it to work. Nothing works yet. This started when I made some changes to a project and then tried to back up the project. I got errors regarding unable to access or write to file REPEAT.CDX. So I renamed that file in the Repeat_files folder and tried again. Then got an error about unable to read files Last Backup.log and List of external exhibits.log in the Logs folder. So I renamed those and tried again. It then got all the way through backing up the project until at the end it says something about a ZIP file being in use, and it didn't create the .SQZ file (but said it completed successfully when I dismissed the error dialog). So I tried backing up without any compression. Same error message, same result. I copied all the folders and files in The Master Genealogist v9 folder to another location, then uninstalled TMG and reinstalled it again. Then when opening the fresh install, tried to restore a previous successful backup file. No luck there either. I'm getting the original poster's message: Variable 'LATEMP' is not found. 44 FRMWIZRESTORE.WIZPAGEFRAME1.PAGE1.CON.INIT I am wondering if one of the recent Windows 10 updates has broken FoxPro or something. That would be a major problem for TMG users with no recourse except to change programs, and I don't want to change to yet another genealogy program (TMG is #4 for me since I started in 1990s). Is anyone still supporting TMG at all? Is the source code available? Maybe I could at least debug it for now. I an fluent in databases and C#, Python, VB, and can learn any language.

Ah, OK -- so basically the highlighting thing actually edits the image file itself. I thought it might be a coordinates stored that puts the highlight on the image at runtime. Now that would be a cool feature! :-) OK, I get what you mean by tree now... a folder tree. I do have a separate folder set up for photos, one for videos, one for documents, etc. So if the db is restored, then all of the exhibits would get put back into only one folder? And the link to them gets changed to point to the one folder that was restored and not the separate folders I have them in? Hmmm... that's not good either.

Hi Jim - thanks for your explanation. So it seems the Exhibit table has a one-to-many relationship, but you cannot set up a many-to-many with it. That's OK, but requires that I change how I use exhibits in my data. I was using them as sort of a 'photo album' in UFT, where a certain photo could be included in many albums (person records), or many albums (person records) could contain the same photo. The TMG design is to use the event or history tag as sort of the intermediate table then? So for example, if your photo is of a family reunion, with say 30 people in it, then you would create one history tag of "Reunion" that's not associated with any individual, then add that tag to all of the person records that are in the picture? I like the image highlight idea though! So you can have a different highlight for each person tagged in the photo somehow? I'd appreciate specific instructions on how to set all this up for my group photos and documents. I'm not sure what you mean by "exhibits stored in a tree" though. Sorry for all the techie questions... I think like a programmer, so I want to understand the underlying structure of the database before I start commiting data to it. :-) Bryan

Now that I understand a bit more about tags, I don't really like the idea of creating a new tag for every photo a person is in. What was the original idea in TMG when they introduced the ability to link exhibits to people? Was it just that you might want to store one portrait of a person as an afterthought? What I had done in Ultimate Family Tree was store a variety of pictures of my ancestors - like one as a youth, one in middle age, one in older age as a record of what they looked like at different stages of life. Most of the pictures include other people in them, which I linked to that photo as well. In UFT you store an exhibit as its own record, and then you can 'connect' whatever people you want to that exhibit record. Like, land deeds would usually connect to both a husband and wife; reunion photos would connect to everyone at the reunion event. But there still is only one exhibit with one title, date, place and description. Being a programmer and database developer, I'm trying to figure out the database schema and what the rationale was for requiring multiple exhibit records for a single image file. It should be set up with a Person table, an Exhibit table, and then an intermediary index that links the person to the exhibit. Bryan

OK, thank you Terry. I really appreciate your help. I have also bookmarked your web site -- I read through your TMG Tips page so far and I am sure to use some of your tips! :-)

OK... that's um... weird. So the "exhibit" I create really does not represent a single exhibit item then. It represents a link between a person or place and an 'exhibit item', which may be the same document/photo/file over and over again. So there is no database table that only holds the exhibit items (or a path to them if external)? That means that if I have a group photo of 20 people and I want to link it to 20 individuals in the database, I have to create 20 exhibits and also duplicate the exhibit info (like caption, description, photo date/place, etc) 20 times? Not real efficient and I would not have programmed it that way myself, but OK. :-) Thanks! Bryan

Thanks, Terry. Can you please give me a step-by-step for the "create a new link to the same image for each person"? That's the part I don't know how to do. Thanks! Bryan

I am new to TMG. I have figured out how to load a new exhibit (image). I would now like to link it to several people. How do I do that? Thanks! Bryan