The Year Ahead – September 1

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.

September 1 – Time to check your data backups! Hitting your cloud storage limit? Delete unwanted files before paying for additional space.

My nightly, automatic backups go into a cloud storage system. There are many services out there and I am not going to recommend one over another, you can Google and find many people who already have done this. My current yearly subscription has 1000 GB and I have used 450.37 GB of storage. Even though I am not running out of space, I know my backups include some from previous computers I had owned. I have copied those backups and moved them to an external drive, in case there is a file on the old computer that I haven’t restored on my current computer. Do I need those files, I don’t know, but I rather be safe than sorry. I plan on deleting those old computers that are no longer being used.

If you don’t have a cloud storage system, now might be the time to start looking into one. What I like about my system, it offers a “sync” folder. This folder resides on my device and in the cloud. If I store something in this drive, it copies it to the cloud and then I can access it from my other device. I currently have a desktop and laptop computer. I take my laptop to my genealogy society meetings and use it to present programs. Thus, when I create my PowerPoint presentations on my desktop, I can save it to the sync folder and later access the PowerPoint presentation from my laptop.

For a small fee, about $5 a month, paid as a yearly subscription, my computer is backed up every night. This as saved me from tears when I accidently deleted something I should not have, or when my computer died on me.

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!