From time to time the national SSURGO template database is updated.  Existing errors are fixed and new capabilities and reports are added.  The changes associated with each version of the SSURGO template database are documented in the system report titled “Template Database Change History”.  Some states distribute a customized version of the national template, and these state custom template databases may also be updated from time to time.

There may come a time when you want to replace your current SSURGO database with an updated version.  You may want to transfer your existing SSURGO data from your current database to the updated database.  This can be accomplished in two different ways.  One way is to export data from your current template database and then import that data into the updated template database.  The other way is to use the updated template database to import data directly from your current template database.  This second method is discussed in detail in the section titled “Accessing an External Soil Database”.  The remainder of this section discusses exporting data from an existing template database.

To export data from you current SSURGO database, open your database in MS Access, select the Macros tab and then run the macro named “Export”.  After the export form is displayed, enter the full path of the directory into which the data should be exported.  The directory into which you export your SSURGO data should not contain any data from a previous SSURGO export.  If it does, and you then import from that directory, the import may fail due to encountering partial data from that previous SSURGO export.

At the current time, the export process does not let you select the soil survey areas to be exported.  The current export process always exports all soil survey areas that currently reside in the database.  If you want to export only selected soil survey areas, make a copy of you current database, and then from the database copy, drop the survey areas you don’t want to export and then export.  See the section titled “Deleting/Updating Data” for more information on dropping soil survey area data.

The export process produces a set of ASCII delimited files in the SSURGO version format of the database from which data is being exported.  This export process does not zip up the individual ASCII delimited files into a single zip file.  Once an export has been produced, that data can then be imported into a different template database by running the Import macro in that database.  See the section titled “Importing Data” for more information about the import process.