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DAT File Question #ancestrycom #treeshare #database

Posted on by Tom Holden

I found some discrepancies in RootsMagic and posted a question. This was in an answer:

C:\Users\Tom\AppData\Roaming\RootsMagic\AMT (change the “Tom ” to your Windows username). In this folder is a .DAT file for each connected Ancestry Member Tree (AMT), named “AT-AncestryTreeID.DAT”, where AncestryTreeID is an integer. This file is a SQLite database containing tables named identically to a subset of the TreeShared RM database file.

Is there any data description documentation on that file? Or any documentation on its purpose in life and what it does.

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ve3meo

 

Very preliminary answer

ve3meo
26 July 2018 14:26:47

Nothing published. Your description is accurate. We surmise that it is created by TreeShare, contains relationships between RM items and Ancestry items that are sync’d. It might be an intermediate file that TreeShare creates before transmitting changes in one or the other directions.

One Reply to “DAT File Question #ancestrycom #treeshare #database”

  1. In 2014, I was seeking a way to share the files in the appdata folder for RootsMagic across multiple computers and came up with changing that folder to a symbolic link to a folder in the local Google Drive on all computers. Under the RM7 folder are the RootsMagicUser.xml file, the spelling dictionary, RMChart.ini. Thus each computer can pick up where the other left off. With TreeShare, another folder appeared, named AMT (Ancestry Member Tree) in which there is a .DAT file for each TreeShared database. I suspect that contains something about the last session that contributes to the reporting of changes. Maybe as simple as the date-time of the last TreeShare Compare to be compared on the RM side with the Date Last Edited value for a person in the database.

    I can confirm that the AT-nnnnnnnn.DAT file in the %appdata%\RootsMagic\AMT folder is the key to your experience with the TreeShare compare state changing from computer to computer sharing the same database file. These .DAT files are SQLite databases having a small set of tables with names matching a subset of the RM database tables. They have a completely different data structure but clearly track changes made through TreeShare with each record having a ModifyDate. So you will want to share those files among the networked computers. The same caveats apply about using putting an active SQLite database on a network drive…

    RM backup does nothing for the .DAT file. Restoring to another computer does not deliver the .DAT file so that computer will look for a local .DAT file with a name containing the ID of the Ancestry Member Tree. It will find an older one or none at all. Hence, the discrepancy.

    Above are my comments from this discussion: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RootsMagicUsers/permalink/1438388209682054/

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