You may have heard the news that the rapture will be occurring to day at 6pm EST. Although I find this doubtful, it is important to have your data backed up in event your own personal computer-Armageddon occurs.
Genealogists, thanks to Geneabloggers, are reminded to backup their data the first day of every month. In honor of the potential rapture, I thought I would discuss some data backup methods a week early.
We often discuss the importance of backing up our genealogical materials such as our family tree file, images, and even our blogs, but what about the rest of your online files?
Do you use Google? Twitter? LinkedIn? Facebook? How about Flickr? Have you ever thought about what would happen if you accidently deleted your account? Or if the site had an outage, similar to what Blogger had last week? I use Backupify, which is a free service that continuously backs up all of my information on sites such as those mentioned above and emails me weekly to let me know that everything has been protected. I highly recommend this service to help you in protecting your data.
The first of each month is data backup day at GeneaBloggers. If you have a self-hosted blog, are you backing it up? I recently learned, thanks to Katy Widrick, that just using the wp-dbmanager plug-in is not enough. This plug-in does not back-up your files, posts or photos.
In order to backup your hard work, make sure you download the backup file from your hosts cPanel. This file is HUGE and takes quite a while to download to your system, but it is well worth the time for your peace of mind. Downloading this monthly and also saving it to an external hard drive or online backup site (such as dropbox), will keep your files safe in case of any problems with your server.
Google Docs now allows any type of document to be uploaded! After seeing this announcement I tried to upload my Gedcom and it does indeed work. This is one more place I recommend you back-up your data each month!
My recent post, Data Backup Weekend, was also an entry into the GeneaBloggers Data Backup Weekend Contest and, amazingly, I WON! My prize is the Handy Backup Standard 6.4 by Novosoft LLC. I am so excited to have this software, which will back up my computer on a monthly, weekly or daily (for those true OCD types) basis without my having to worry about it. I am so excited to start playing with this new software and will let you all know what I think about it for the next Data Backup day:-)
Thank you GeneaBloggers and Novosoft LLC!
Due to the holidays, instead of just one Data Backup Day, we have a whole Data Backup Weekend! My data backup plan consists of:
- An external hard-drive, which I backup to monthly, more if I have added a lot of information in a day or week.
- I email myself a copy of my gedcom on a monthly basis, in case my computer and external hard-drive fail.
- I have a Geni family tree which has names, dates, events and photos.
What I need to do:
- I am currently transcribing all the documents I have into my genealogy program. Following that I will need to scan them and link them in the program. This will protect my paper resources, if anything should happen to my apartment.
- I need to upload my scanned photos to my newly created Flickr account in case something happens to my computer and external hard-drive.
- I need to scan more photos, as I would be devastated if I lost some of these.
- I need to start saving a copy of my blog monthly to my computer and hard-drive, in case Blogger has a problem and loses it.
I highly recommend you, too, have a data backup plan that you are following. It would be horrible to lose all your work when there are such simple things to do.
It’s the first day of the month, which means Data Backup Day for Genea-Bloggers.
I also email myself a copy of my main genealogy file, both as a Legacy file and as a gedcom. I am hopeful Google documents will one day include gedcom’s as a supported file, but not yet…
My worst fear would be to spend a whole day adding new information and then just having the files disappear or get corrupted.
Next on my to do list is to start backing up my blog as well.
Don’t lose your all your hard work – join us for Data Backup Day!
