I've got a bookkeeper that looks after all my accounts - I send him my invoices and receipts and he puts it all into Sage Instant Accounts for me as accounting makes my head hurt.

For those not familiar with them, Sage is the Microsoft of the UK accounting industry. They operate internationally, but they have the UK SMB accounting market almost to themselves. Instant accounts is their entry-level package. Like all accounting software, it is a mishmash of old Windows 3 code that never got updated, poor interface design and bizarre approaches to otherwise simple tasks. It's designed to lock you in and keep you buying their annual support and expensive pre-printed stationery. It's everything that's bad about business software in one easy to swallow pill.</rant>

A couple of weeks ago, he had to reinstall his PC for some reason and made a backup of his Sage data. Sage only provides one method for backing up or transferring data to another computer - a proprietary archive file that contains hundreds of files from the Program Files directory, most of which aren't even necessary (it backs up the .bmp file for the splash screen, for example).

When the time came to restore the data back into a freshly installed copy of Sage, it appeared to read the file fine, listing all the files it has restored, but once complete, all the ledgers, reports, etc were empty, as if nothing had been restored.

He even tried a known-good backup file (it was sent to my accountant to do the end of year report last year, so is known to be a good file) and that failed with the same problem.

I also tried restoring both files multiple times, to no avail. We even sent the file to the accountant to see if he had any luck, again no joy and just like us, he couldn't restore the same file that he'd used just a few months before.

So we're stumped. Known-good backup files aren't restoring for any of us. Something is up, but we don't know what. I've searched around the net, but all references to restoring Sage data never mention what to do if it fails. Sage's website doesn't mention anything like this and they won't talk to me unless I pay them £80-odd for 'SageCover'. This also includes a data recovery service, but the last thing I want to do is give them more money with no guarantee of them being able to do anything.

I've been unable to find an accounting forum where there is any mention of Sage to ask questions - does anyone have anywhere to suggest?

Anyone here familiar with Sage able to provide any help or suggestions?