What To Backup

Digital Files - Photos - Favorites - Letters

What to backup in genealogy - everything! Here are some things you might never have thought of, but which would cause you great anguish if you lost them.

What to backup can be answered by looking at the many different areas of genealogy information you have gathered.

You can think of backing up as making a copy of your information. This might include photocopies of data you have on paper, scans of photographs, duplicate computer files of all your digital materials.

You copy your data files. These are the files your software creates to store the data you enter into the program. This may be a single file for each family file you create. More often, however, there is more than one file and unless you get all of them, you may not be able to recover your data.

You may need to open your genealogical program's documentation, whether it is in online help or a printed manual. You are looking at what to backup from all the program files so find the names and locations of all your data files.

Don't forget about other key files that you need to include beyond just the program database files. These might include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

• Do you copy images from your digital camera to your computer, and then clear the camera's storage card?
• Have you scanned documents, photos, newspaper articles, obituaries, and such to your hard drive?
• If you use Web mail (Yahoo, MSN, gmail, etc.) your saved emails remain on your ISP's server, and you need to print copies of those containing family information that you wish to keep.
• If you use an email program to store your emails on your local computer then you need to copy those files from your saved email too.
• What about your bookmarks or favorites in your internet browser? Do you have several that point to family tree information on the web that you might not be able to find again without the bookmark to do it? Saving your bookmarks is easy in most browsers, and can save you if your computer fails.
• Do you save actual web pages with links in them to your local computer so you can work with those pages offline? This can be useful for pages that are likely to be available for only a short period. It allows you to keep the information on those pages in an easy manner, and to have that data even if the web site or specific page disappears. Those saved web sites are included in the what to backup question.
• Don't forget to include any video clips you made have made at the family reunion, or anywhere else. You need to have a copy in case anything happens to the original.
• What about interviews you have done with family members or neighbors of your family? Make copies of these audio files you have created. You do not want to lose your only copy of those.
• Think hard about any other types of data files that you save in your genealogy research which need to be backed up.

Don't risk the loss of all this data forever because of a computer failure or worse. Especially, do not get caught by a loss of data simply because you did not understand what to backup.

When do you need to copy your data?

How do you perform a complete copy?

Where do you keep the files once you have copied all your genealogy data?

How long do you keep your copies?

Be Sure to Backup All Your Genealogy Research Files