Making a decision to upgrade or update or change software.

There's probably no question here, but I wanted to tell my story in case others run into people facing this (or a similar situation) in the future...

I used Generations for my genealogy software from 1996/7 until 2014. I knew I was on borrowed time for many years because FTM had bought out Generations in ~2002(?) and never released another update before withdrawing it from the market. To put it in context, I think it was designed to run on Windows XP at best (maybe not even that). Nevertheless, it continued to run on my computer with each new Windows operating system until some sort of update last summer (even after Windows 8 came out). I tried to back out of all recent system updates when I discovered the problem but could not get Generations to function properly again, although I could still access all data and produce reports, export, etc.

I compared the latest genealogy software and finally selected Legacy. It had an import for Generations, but if I remember correctly (this was last summer), it did not pull in all my information. With Generations and most other programs back 15 years ago, except for vital statistics, everything went into either one long general "Note," "Research" field, or "Military" note. So I experimented with every possible export/import setting (not being aware of the Users Group here for advice), and came up with a process that was almost perfect, exporting from Generations to a Gedcom file and importing that into Legacy. One "small" glitch could not be overcome - the process removed all line breaks and paragraphs from the Notes, Research and Military fields. So my carefully organized information on census records, estate inventory lists, etc., were all merged into one long, single paragraph in Legacy's Notes field. 

So to straighten out the information, I need to check each individual. I could simply insert paragraphs and line breaks, but this is the only time I could force myself to move all this information into Legacy's various events and better structure the source citations. My problem? Just that I have ~18,000 individuals to check, and maybe 1/3-1/2 will need this manual editing. Last summer I found I could only average edits for about 10 people per night times 5 nights each week. So 50 people per week divided into at least 6,000 entries gives a minimum of 120 weeks to complete my conversion. It was my mistake for waiting for 15 years to move to new software, and I slacked off after about 5 weeks. I still do some research and update the family tree but I will not be able to produce any large reports again until this is finished. When I retire in a few years, if I could spend half a day on this every day, I might be able to finish this "project" in 4-6 months. Sigh.

I guess this is a warning for people to not ignore changes in the software market, although this audience of Legacy users is certainly not at risk like old software dinosaurs out there like I was.