As the SnapPlus team moves toward a new release, we publish a "beta testing" version of the software. When we make the final release, we update the beta to be identical to the release software. To Windows, the two are completely different "products" that happen to have "SnapPlus" in their name; you can install and uninstall the release product and the beta independently, and they will not interfere with each other. So if you have some plans you want to maintain in one version of the software, and some in another, you can run a beta and release product on the same machine.

For example, if you have farms that you want to maintain in version 16.3 and some in version 17.0, once the SnapPlus release comes out, you can just download and install the beta of 17.0. It works exactly the same way as the 17.0 release product.

A few caveats:

•It's a really good idea to take a snapshot of a farm before opening it in a newer SnapPlus version, or indeed doing any kind of sweeping change.

•We provide forward compatibility, but not backward. For example, you can take a farm that you've maintained in 16.3 release and open it in 17.0 beta. However, opening the farm updates its data to the new standards; taking the same farm and opening it in 16.3 again may cause you to lose data.

•SnapMaps Beta isn't forever. SnapPlus Desktop and SnapMaps evolve in tandem, so an earlier version of SnapPlus can't necessarily talk to a later version of SnapMaps. We keep the SnapMaps beta server going for a good while after each release, but eventually we need to get ready for the next version, and have to update it. If you're still using the SnapPlus Desktop beta when that occurs, you could find that the new version's beta might not talk to your SnapPlus Desktop at some point, and the data up on the server might become inaccessible to you.

So we recommend the following best practices:

•Only use the previous version if you must. As soon as practicable, replace the "release" product on your computer with the latest SnapPlus release, and use that going forward.

•Don't forget to download your data from SnapMaps! We provide a migration path forward for data in your .snapDb files, including anything downloaded from SnapMaps.

•Make a clean break. Don't use a copy of the same farm in the old "release" and new "beta" products; eventually you (and we) won't know which is the "correct" data.