The Year Ahead – January 8

In the January/February 2024 issue of Family Tree Magazine, they have introduced The Year Ahead, 366 genealogy tips will make 2024 your best research year yet by Lisa A Alzo. Lisa mapped out a day-by-day research plan.

January 8 – Create a backup system for your research that uses the 3-2-1 principle: three different copies on two different media, with at least one of them backed up offsite (such as in the cloud)

We all know that backups are important. However, just like dusting our baseboards, it’s something we put off because it’s not fun. You would think that learning the hard way, would have been enough for me to change my habits. Sadly, not at first. I have lost information over the years because of computer issues. 

In my early years of research, I worked on a family history book with my aunt. I manually typed it up using WordPerfect. This was in the early 1990’s. I printed out the pages as we went, we photocopied images onto the pages, where I left blank space for the photos. While working on this book, I diligently, put in all the proper codes to populate the table of contents and a book index. However, before I could generate the index, my computer failed and I lost the entire book. Looking back, if I had taken the computer to a computer guru, she/he would have been able to rescue my hard drive. My computer was having a keyboard issue on the motherboard. Backups in those days wasn’t cheap. The file was too big to copy to a floppy drive and external hard drives were out of my reach.

Fast forward many years. When I started to do more genealogy and external hard drives were more economical, I started a monthly back up of my important computer data. I knew I didn’t need the programs; those could be reinstalled. I keep a small box, for all my install disk for my computer along with any program codes to activate if needed. I even created those “restore” disk when I purchased a new computer. However, my external hard drive crashed. I had moved some things to my external hard drive that I didn’t have on my computer. Big Mistake! Then I got the “blue screen” of death and knew I should be okay; except I hadn’t done my monthly backups for about 6 months. You know the saying, later, later, I was too busy to be bothered. I lost six months of my genealogy research; I will never know exactly what I lost. 

I have placed a monthly reminder on my phone for my monthly backups and I have added a cloud backup system too. The one I use isn’t important, what is important is that I am using a cloud backup system. It does incremental backups, which means only new files or files that have changed are backed up nightly. It also offers a sync drive where I can store files that I can access easily not only from my desktop, but from my laptop too. I have placed my genealogy documents on this drive. 

I have had many “blue screen” of death over the years, even with my new computer I purchased in 2022. However, restoring from the cloud backup and my manual hard drive have made it almost painless. 

One final note, if you use flash drives, don’t forgot to back up those too. I have a folder on my desktop computer for backing up my flash drives, and then my cloud backup system can back those up for me. I also, back them up monthly on my external hard drive. I don’t use my flash drives that much anymore, so I only back up those that have changed.

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!