Backups - Part I (An Overview)

You have just spent the past two days working hard on your family tree and it is late at night. Do you a) go to bed or b) back up your work then go to bed? If you answered 'b' then I'm already preaching to the choir but for the rest of you you might want to read on.

We've all heard the warnings and think it will never happen to us so we keep putting it off until it is too late.What am I talking about?

Backups

Making a back up of all your hard work is like having an insurance policy. You really hope you don't need it but if something bad happens it is such a wonderful feeling to know you are covered. A back up can be as simple as copying your files to a USB memory stick or dropping those same files into a folder on Dropbox (as an example one of many Internet based storage sites).

No matter how you do it at least back up all your important files, genealogy and others, at least once a month. Personally I backup the information on my desktop and laptop to an external hard disk on the first of the month. Also, after a day's work of research I will make a copy of all my genealogy files to a USB thumb drive.

So set up a reminder in your calendar to do a back up. If your genealogy software has a reminder function, put it in there also. Even better, if your genealogy software can automatically backup your database then set it to do so when you shut it down for the night.

But for your sake and sanity please:

BACK UP YOUR DATA