You’ve spent hours, days, maybe even years, researching your family. You’ve compiled tons of data and information about names, dates, and relationships between ancestors, and combined it all into one fantastic family tree. Maybe you’ve taken the time to type out dozens of family stories that have been handed down from one generation to the next. Or, you’ve made audio recordings of these stories, so you can hear the voices of your relatives as they tell the stories themselves. All this information is precious. So, you store it all on your computer. Now, what happens if your hard drive crashes? Suddenly, all that information is gone! This is the nightmare of many genealogists.
Technology can be a wonderful thing. We can use our computers to connect to living relatives through email, and social networking websites. Photographs, no matter how old, can be scanned into our computers, and safely viewed over and over again without having to worry about exposing them to sun damage, or wear and tear. Audio recordings of family stories were never easier to record and store than they are today, with the variety of recording technology that is at our fingertips. These sorts of things can make your genealogy research more interesting. The countless pages of data you have collected about your family can be electronically stored on your hard drive. It takes up almost no space at all, compared to how much space the pile of paperwork takes up. With all these tools available, it’s no wonder that so many genealogists store the results of their research on their computer hard drives.
Fortunately, there is an excellent way to back up your family tree. There is a website called “BackUpMyTree”. You can use their services to safely back up all of your important genealogy research onto their servers. Now, if the worst case scenario happens, your hard drive crashes and takes your entire family tree down with it, you will still have access to it. The BackUpMyTree software automatically finds and creates a remote, off-site, copy of your family tree files. It will note whatever changes you make, and previous versions of your data are saved as well. You can access it at anytime, like, right after you install a brand new hard drive, for example.
Image by Bill Bradford on Flickr