When installing upgrades to Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200 it is not uncommon for duplicate or backup copies of the program to remain in place on your network hard drive while a new version is installed.

This is often done so that your company has a way to roll back to the earlier version of Sage MAS 90 or 200 should something go wrong during (or after) the upgrade.

Unfortunately what often happens is that old copies of MAS 90 are left behind and never erased. This can cause confusion down the road if someone attempts to setup a workstation connecting to your older (and now innacurate) MAS 90 or MAS 200 data.

How To Safely Remove Test Versions of MAS 90 or MAS 200

First, determine where your LIVE (good) Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200 is installed. You can refer to the instructions in this post which outline how to find the proper folder.

Once you find the PROPER folder — take care NOT to delete that one as it is the location of your live active data.

Instead search your hard drive for any folders other than the one above which contain the \MAS90 structure.

Once you’ve located \MAS90 folders which you believe are older test versions, I strongly suggest that you:

A. Rename the suspected older folder to \MAS90OLDTOBEDELETED
B. Within the \MAS90OLDTOBEDELETED\HOME folder rename pvxwin32.exe to be pvxwin32.old

What you’ve just done in the above steps is disable your old version of Sage MAS 90 from starting up. I like to do this and let the system stay this way for several days so I can see if there are any people accessing the old MAS 90 program (usually not) – but more importantly renaming the folder will expose any third party applications which might be using data within the old MAS 90 folder structure.

If there are programs such as paperless or FRX or F9 that try to access the old MAS 90 folder (which you renamed to \MAS90OLDTOBEDELETED) then you will receive an error message which then lets you know that you have either the wrong folder or you need to contact your Sage business partner about moving data outside that folder.

I strongly recommend you make a backup of any files PRIOR to deleting them.

Once several days have passed and nobody has received error messages related to the old data folder – it is generally ok to first make a copy of that OLD folder and to delete it. IMPORTANT: BE SURE YOU ARE DELETING THE \MAS90TOBEDELETED FOLDER AND NOT YOUR LIVE DATA. MAKE A BACKUP FIRST.