When most people make a significant investment, such as a home or a fine art collection, they insure it.
Your collection of genealogy documents, photos, and research is a unique investment that deserves protection, too. Your research and findings cost significant time, money, and effort. You may have traveled or spent many hours and considerable dollars in pursuit of your family history. Some of your finds may be irreplaceable, such as original photos, oral history interviews with now-deceased relatives, and copies of documents that are now closed to access.
That means you need to make a plan to protect your genealogy research. Your computer, hard drives, and paper files are all at risk. Natural disasters such as storms, fires, and floods can damage or destroy them. So can manmade problems, including theft and accidents. Relatively minor mishaps like burst pipes or spills—the most common kinds of damage for the typical genealogist—can waterlog priceless records and a lifetime of research in minutes. And who hasn’t lost a computer file to a technical glitch or because you hit the wrong keystroke at the wrong time?
Ways to protect your research:
Invest in remote cloud storage - Online data storage providers, what we call “cloud” storage, upload your data files to the company’s remote servers according to your activation schedule. The initial upload can take a long time, depending on your local network speed and how much data you need to store. Cloud storage is sometimes considered “cold storage” or “archival storage” because it can take considerable time to upload files and restore lost data. It’s best used as insurance against loss, not for daily access.
Regularly back up your files—Anyone who’s lost family tree databases, research notes, written narratives, digitized documents, or photos due to a hard drive crash knows you can’t have too many backup copies. The best time to back up your work is when you’ve updated your files. During a significant research or photo-scanning session, save often and copy to a second medium when you finish. Consider daily and weekly backups of large, recently changed, and new files. Once a month, save a fresh copy of your entire genealogy folder. The first of the month is a popular and easy-to-remember “genealogy backup day.” By definition, a backup is simply a copy or replacement. You need to be able to access your genealogy database files if your computer hard drive fails. It won’t help if you’ve made a backup copy stored in another folder on the same computer. You need that copy on another storage media, such as an external hard drive, flash drive, online, or “cloud” storage.
How I wish I had known about "cloud" storage years ago. I had a computer that crashed, so I upgraded to a new computer, but it would not open my external hard drive. I kept getting a message that the drive was unreadable. I took my external hard drive to a friend, and she was able to open it on her computer and save it to a new external hard drive for me.
I now have an external hard drive, a backup to the external hard drive, and "cloud" storage!
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