Embarcadero RAD Studio: Migration of existing IDE settings

With the growing complexity of programming tools, also the time needed to adjust IDE and adapt it to specific needs or habits is prolonged. It is a reason why reinstallation or update is a nightmare for many developers.

The RAD Studio, Delphi, and C ++ Builder environments have therefore been enhanced by the Migration Tool. Using it, all settings that can be made within the environment (menu *Tools => Options*) can be backed up and saved. The tool is primarily designed to migrate existing settings and move them to a later version of the environment, for example, when you upgrade or update it. However, it can also be used to preserve user-proven, functional status.

The *Migration tool* is a standalone executable application (.exe) located in the "bin" directory of the RAD Studio, Delphi, or C ++ Builder installation. The standard path to the bin directory (for the Rio version) is C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\19.0\bin.

After you run the tool, you need to choose the operation you want to perform. For the backup choose *Export settings to a migration file*, for migration settings to a later version choose *Migrate settings to a newer product version*.

Now you need to select the version whose settings are to be saved:

In the next step is possible to select the settings to be backed up. You can perform a partial backup / restore for the selected settings sections:

Specify the location and file name where which the settings will be saved:

After pressing the *Finish* button, a backup of all selected settings is performed. Now we can uninstall the original version, install a new one and run the included *Migration Tool* to load the appropriate configuration:

With the ability to select just a subset of settings, the saved configuration can also be used to unify important settings within a team, transfer them to another computer, or repair settings that have been corrupted during *making experiments*.

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