Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Back Up Your Genealogy and More

 


The first of every month is backup day. 

Don't take any chances with your genealogy! Having lost a few folders of family photos to some computer glitch years ago, I'm careful to back up both automatically and manually.

I have three external hard drives, as you can see, with one specifically for all those wonderful family and family history photos. That drive is where I put my manual backups--meaning that when I create something new or update something, I copy and paste it on that hard drive. All of my genealogy presentations are also backed up on the photo hard drive.

The other two hard drives store daily and weekly backup drives, running automatically in the background. (I schedule my backups at a time when I'm not active on the computer so I can leave it running and step away while the automatic systems do the backups.)

For extra safety, I put genealogy presentations on flash drives in case something doesn't work properly as I'm speaking, and I need to make a switch quickly. Plus I have two cloud backups running every day.

My family trees are on multiple sites, as well as on my RootsMagic8 software. 

Lots of copies keep stuff safe. LOCKSS! Please backup regularly. Your descendants will thank you. 

3 comments:

  1. How are your other hard drives running automatically? Do you always have them connected to your computer? Do you save to them at the end of each session, or is there a way to just have it automatically go to the hard drive.

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    1. All my hard drives are always connected to my computer. I set a schedule for the automatic backups via software and let the backups run when I'm not active on the computer. One backup goes automatically to one hard drive, one backup goes automatically into the cloud. The other hard drive I back up manually every week. But you're also right--when I finish a key document or project I back up that entire file or folder manually! TY for reading and commenting.

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    2. Thank you. This is an area that confounds me and I am overthinking it!! This helps

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