Blog

Since it’s the middle of the year, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone to back up their Dragon user profile.

Like any data, if you like it –  back it up!
Your Dragon user profile contains all the acoustic information that Dragon has learned about your voice since you started using it. It also contains a vocabulary that you have tuned to your specific use. Things like acronyms, surnames, unusual capitalisations and any other words you’ve added to your vocabulary to make sure that Dragon understand what you’re saying. Through packages all this information about your voice and your vocabulary into one folder which can be exported to a USB memory stick or other external storage medium such as a network drive. That means that if your computer dies and needs reformatting, or if you simply buy a new computer and want to transfer your Dragon NaturallySpeaking software to that PC – then you can quickly and easily restore the user without doing any voice training and without adding all those special words into a new vocabulary.

Suffice to say, this will save you an incredible amount of time and eliminate any frustration that you might experience if you had to start from scratch with Dragon.

So how we do this? It’s pretty straightforward:

Start-up Dragon. Now your Dragon toolbar should be visible.

1.Click on “PROFILE”
2. Click on “MANAGE USER PROFILES”

3. Highlight the user that you want to export.
4. On the right you will see a button called “ADVANCED>” click on that.

5. Now click on “EXPORT.” Don’t click on “backup” because it’s much easier to import and export the folder.
6. Now navigate to a folder that is on an external drive, network, USB memory stick or anywhere you perform your normal backups.
7. Now Dragon will export the Dragon user profile to that location for safe keeping.

And if you ever need to restore the user you can simply reverse this process and choose “IMPORT” and your user will be restored – as good as new!

This will save an endless amount of frustration. It’s something our trainers at voice recognition Australia always do when training uses on-site or remotely. It’s part of our professional services. We don’t want our valuable customers to be frustrated they have lost their user profile after spending so much time developing the vocabulary.
You never know when something can go wrong with your PC due to a virus, hard drive failure or any number of other reasons why you might lose all your data.

So make sure you complete the above steps every three months. Just like your favourite family photos, export your user profile to somewhere safe.

Now you can simply concentrate on enjoying the extra time that you have gained by using Dragon NaturallySpeaking each day!