Have you seen Dick Eastman’s monthly prompt to backup your computer? Or his blog about creating multiple backups? Or James Tanner’s post, How Long do SSDs and Hard Disks Last? If so, I’m assuming that you have a backup plan in place for your genealogy data!
Besides your personal genealogy data, there’s another set of historical and/or genealogical data that also needs preserved. This data is housed at your local or regional historical or genealogical society. I volunteer for the Nemaha County Historical Society. They already had a backup plan for the data associated with their PastPerfect museum software. However, they did not have a backup plan for the documents and pictures stored on the individual computers. When we purchased a Microsoft Office subscription for each of the four computers, I configured OneDrive to ‘backup’ the desktop, documents and pictures.
I don’t know about your local society, but our society works on a ‘shoestring’ budget, particularly when it comes to technology. The society has four workstations running Windows 10. None of these workstations are upgradeable to Windows 11. Thus, all four need replaced relatively soon. While the board had discussed this need, the actual purchase of new computers was being delayed.
However, the computer running the PastPerfect software let us know last week that we couldn’t put off replacing it any longer. It’s power supply failed and it would not stay on. Thus a new computer was ordered.
When the new computer arrived, the priority was to get PastPerfect installed and the backups restored. Thanks to a phone conversation with PastPerfect’s technical support, I learned that if we could access the hard drive on the original computer, we could just copy the data off of that hard drive and transfer it to the new computer. Thanks to my gadget collecting husband, he had a case that allowed us to pull the hard drive and attach it via USB to the new computer. Thus, I was able to copy the data, images and multimedia for PastPerfect from the old hard drive onto the new computer. Even though we have 3 sets of backup data, we did not have to use any of it.
The next step was restoring the documents, pictures and desktop. Once I logged into OneDrive, I was able to indicate which folders needed stored locally. Then it was just a matter of time for those folders and files to be downloaded.
From this experience, I will be proposing a new backup plan that is more of a ‘copy’ plan. As a former school technology coordinator, I struggled with backups and trying to retrieve a lost file from a backup. That’s when I discovered the program, Second Copy. I still use second copy to ‘backup’ the files on my home computer to portable hard drives. Thus, I will be proposing a similar procedure for the historical society.
So, again, do you have a backup plan? Does it include off-site or cloud storage? Are you able to locate a file in your backup and restore it to your computer? Being able to copy / download files made my life much easier when setting up this new computer.
I don’t do cloud backup for the simple reason that my internet is rural and slow – Dropbox etc would slow it to a crawl.
I have two external hard drives, one of which is with me at all times (I have it in my purse) and update them both weekly.
It is scary thinking what might happen, but there’s only so much I can do with the limits I have.
I totally understand Internet issues. I live in a small rural town in northeast Kansas. The town itself has decent Internet but there are many farmsteads that aren’t so fortunate. From the early days of the Internet, I contended that rural areas were disabled when it came to Internet access. We are somewhat fortunate in that the small Internet providers have been building their networks out to those farmsteads — but many still do not have access to high speed Internet.
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