Question Migrating from Legacy Family Tree to Webtrees

I got two files from my mum who has used Legacy for several years but is not impressed. We will test webtrees instead.She sent me two files:

1. zip.ged of 460 kb
2. .fdb file of 3.1 mb

I have imported the zip.ged file and it almost works. Some critical diacritical letters come out in bad shape. Apparently Legacy exports ANSI but webtrees work with UTF-8. We'll try to get a better export file.

My main question is: how do I import the .fdb file?

I could try importing it to see what happens. But before risking a mess, I would like to hear if someone have experiences of this. From my searches of importing in the Forum, I haven't found any explicit info, but a few examples of things going awry.

> We'll try to get a better export file.

Probably not needed. On the webtrees import dialog there is a field "character encoding" under "Import Preferences".
Some common values to try are Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 .

> how do I import the .fdb file?

Outside of Legacy: you don't. The GEDCOM file contains all you need for webtrees (apart from the images)

I got that, from finding sources. But the images are missing. All the screen dumps from old books with the sources. How could I import them if I can't import the .fdb file?

Thanks. The Windows-1250 worked.

> how do I import the .fdb file?

Outside of Legacy: you don't. The GEDCOM file contains all you need for webtrees (apart from the images)

I agree with Bertkoor. The FTB file is a binary representation of Legacy's internal database structure, which was built with Microsoft's firebird database engine. webtrees is built with a different database engine, and furthermore the structure of their respective data tables is completely unrelated, so webtrees couldn't possibly understand the data stored in Legacy's database even if it could read it.

I did find an online tool for converting from FDB format to Excel  here  but it's not going to be very helpful. In the best case, if you browse through the Excel output you might see the missing image files buried in there somewhere, but you will need to pluck them out individually and put them where they belong.

Thank you! We'll put them all in manually then. It's 30-40 files, so it won't take too long.