When a TallyPrime company won’t open: repair, migrate or restore

Company data can be damaged by a system glitch, a sudden crash, unauthorised access or invalid entries. Before you try any fix, back up the data as it is and save any unsaved vouchers or masters. The repair screen also offers to back up the data first, and it’s worth saying yes.

Go to F1 (Help) > Troubleshooting > Repair, or Alt+Y (Data) > Repair, and select the company. Set Backup Company Data before Repair to Yes, choose where the backup goes, and press R to repair. Depending on how badly the data is damaged and how large it is, the repair can take a while.

Repair finds and fixes the damage and recovers what it can. Any data it can’t recover is removed to protect the rest. From Release 3.0, TallyPrime shows a report comparing your data before and after the repair, and Alt+X opens any exceptions so you can see what needs attention.

A company may show Repair Required in the list of companies, but data can be damaged without any status showing. Tally suggests free disk space of at least double the size of the data, and repairing data on a local disk rather than an external drive.

Tally lists several messages that mean the company data needs repairing, among them “Memory Access Violation”, “Data files damaged. Need to rewrite.” and “File damaged”, along with errors that name the Tranmgr, Linkmgr or Manager files. For “File Damaged or Repair Required”, the advice is the same: back up, then repair.

If a repair doesn’t clear the error, some cases need deeper steps, such as checking the hard disk for bad sectors or going back to an earlier backup, depending on which file is affected. That’s the point to call your Tally partner, rather than deleting or renaming files in the data folder yourself.

A newer release of TallyPrime may need to migrate a company’s data before it opens. Go to F1 (Help) > Troubleshooting > Migrate, or Alt+Y (Data) > Migrate, select the company, keep Backup Company Data before Migration set to Yes, and press R. A valid TSS is needed to migrate to the latest release.

If migration reports that the data is corrupted, Tally’s advice is to repair it in the previous release it worked in, and then migrate again. If you see “Unable to open the company in this release of TallyPrime”, the data was last used in a higher release than the one you’re running: open it in that release, or install the latest release in a new folder, reactivate the licence and restore the backup there.

If the data can’t be recovered, restore your most recent backup and re-enter anything recorded since. On Release 7.0 and later, that’s Alt+Y (Data) > Backup & Restore > Restore; on Release 6.2 and earlier, Alt+Y (Data) > Restore. Tally is clear that data damaged by malware can’t be recovered at all, and it recommends backing up every day.

Antivirus and backup software can lock or block the data files. Tally recommends adding the TallyPrime data folder to your antivirus exclusion list, along with Tally.exe, Tallyadmin.exe and the data files (.tsf and .1800), giving the data folder full control permissions, and excluding .tsf files from third-party backup tools. Error Code 32, for one, comes from files locked by backup software or by an antivirus program’s ransomware protection.

Schedule backups for times when nobody is working in TallyPrime, and don’t copy or double-click the .tsf files in the data folder. Powercomputers’ backup and data security service can set up scheduled backups and user controls for you.