Upgrading mastercam and migrating files 2019 2018 without wasting your time.

My time is valuable. When Mastercam costs me time, that takes away from the tiny amount of time I spend with my family and contributes to the reason why I'm overweight and have lower quality of life like most of the mastercam programmers I know. I just upgraded to 2019 beta. It crashed my windows startup initially, so I had to spend 11 hours working with windows 7 (watching youtube tutorials on a laptop in my office and doing various Command prompt hacks) to get my computer back to a working configuration. I then re-installed 2019, and opened a job I needed to work on. I couldn't get my post to be referenced. I did about an hour of horribly boring moving files from 2018 shared to 2019 shared in two locations and then realized that wasn't working. CNC Software has made the 2018 file not visible to 2019 to protect their interest most likely. I don't appreciate when their interest costs my time, and I don't understand why the install can't automatically reference the 2018 files and move them to 2019 or just use the old files.

I discovered they had a video covering migration (or a reseller had a video?) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjhnfzxR4Lo

That's cool. For whatever reason they couldn't be bothered to reference it on the download page to remind people who do other stuff all year that Mastercam required this step on upgrade. I mentioned that to a reseller last year after I had this same problem but I forgot the solution in the year that passed.

So I'm down about 2 more hours, and I can't post this link to the Beta download page, because I don't work there, but I can post it here and hopefully save you some time if you unlike me search early and waste less of your life before realizing you are screwed and have to call a reseller and waste their time.

I would have called my reseler like I did last year and wasted their time figuring this out, but my internet was temporarily down and I didn't have the number handy, so they were actually closed by the time the internet cooperated.