Moving to Evidentia 4, Whatever Version You’re Coming From

Moving your research to a new version of Evidentia can feel risky — you don’t want anything to get lost. The good news: Evidentia 4 has a clear, tested way to bring your data forward, no matter which version you’re using now.

Evidentia 3+ users: almost nothing to do

Evidentia 4 opens your existing Evidentia 3+ database right away. Nothing is deleted, changed, or converted.

The only thing you need is a new license key — Evidentia 4 uses a different kind than Evidentia 3+. Get your new key on our license key page before you open your database. That’s it.

Coming from Evidentia 1, 2, or 3

Older versions of Evidentia save your data in a different kind of file, so Evidentia 4 can’t open it directly. But there’s a simple, well-tested way to bring it over — the same way that already worked for Evidentia 3+ users.

Restore replaces everything in Evidentia 4 with your old data. Merge adds your old data without deleting anything new. Either way, Evidentia 4 already knows how to read backup files from every past version — it fixes up the old format for you automatically.

One more thing: moving your database does not move your photos, PDFs, and scans. You need to copy those files yourself into Evidentia 4’s EvidentiaSoftware/Records folder. If you miss any, our attachment audit tool will find the broken links so you know exactly what to go looking for.

One extra note for original Evidentia 3 users

If you used the very first Evidentia 3 (not 3+), two things won’t come over automatically: your Lineage Tracker history and any custom claim types you created. This isn’t new to Evidentia 4 — it’s the same limit that 3+ users ran into, and we already wrote up a simple fix for it. The same fix still works.

If anything doesn’t go the way this page describes, reach out. We’d rather fix it than have you stuck.

— Ed Thompson, Evidentia Software