Genealogy Chat

When I closed my computer down last night everything was fine. When I switched it on this morning... Zilch, Nothing, Nowt. My hard drive had failed completely.

Frustrating morning spent trying to coax it back to life but abject failure resulting in the purchase and installation of a new hard drive and the re-installation of my operating system and countless programmes.

Things could have been a lot worse however as only 2 weeks ago fearing that a 4 year old computer might not last forever I had purchased an external Hard drive and had made copies of all my files on to that. Had I not have done so all my family history lovingly crafted and recorded in Family Tree Maker and all my scanned wills, certificates, family bible entries, 1911 census records and old family photographs ect would have been lost.

I reckon that the £40 the external hard drive cost me will probably turn out to be the best £40 I will spend this year.

And the point of telling you this is to make everyone aware of the danger of having all your eggs in the same basket. Make sure that your important files are backed up somewhere other than on your computer. Be that on CD, DVD, Memory Stick or another Hard drive.

A good point that people should be aware of, Jonesey. We keep a copy of our Familytree Maker on cd plus another copy kept at our son's house just in case our house burns down. We may lose everything but we'll still have our family tree!

Mmmm................darn good idea! Me thinks I will invest in an external drive.

Seems more logical to have all genealogy stuff in one place for starters.

I have several 'Word Documents - History of the XXXX Family' - whcih I update as and when new infomation has been found and proven. This enables me to pass on information to my cousins etc., periodically either by post or email as they don't all 'do' genealogy. I'd hate to lose those files. So much work gone into transferring info from Census records, certificates etc.

I have a lot of genealogy stuff on CD's too but it's a nightmare trying to find certain things on them..my own fault of course for not labeling them all correctly!

.

Sensible guy, that Jonesy.

I'm off to get an external hard drive, I thought they were about £200.

Meg,

I bought mine, a 320Gb one for £39.99 at PC world. It just plugs into a USB socket whenever needed. It is manufactured by Western Digital.

I keep my offline tree and lots of other stuff on a memory stick - which I back up onto the pc periodically. It also means that I can work on my family tree at work in my lunch break ...

Jill

Thanks Jonesy. Tomorrow's job.

I agree with all. My computer became unstuck the other day but I had backed-up only the night before on an external hard drive.

However usb/memory sticks have so much memory now they are just as good.

Another thing I've learnt about recently is the website https://www.dropbox.com . You can drop files into your account which means all your data is stored away from home as often your pc/laptop and external drive/stick are in the same place if a disaster happens such as fire or theft.

You can access dropbox, obviously, from anywhere in the world and on any computer. You can register for free and up to 2GB of storage is free.

Ozi

Oh Ozi - that sounds useful.

Jill

Don't forget to back up your e-mail messages and contacts too. When my old computer gave up the ghost I had backed up all the important files but forgotten about the Outlook messages. There was a lot of valuable information in there that I no longer have, and some contacts I have lost touch with.

Now she tells me (lol)

I had indeed forgotten to do that. As far as email addresses are concerned I have another way of recovering those quite easily but my favourite websites will take a lot longer to get back together particularly my Genealogy ones of which I had at least 100.

right chaps, i have got a Medion 1 terrabyte drive from Lidl a few weeks ago for £79.

how do I go about cloning? my hard drive to it.
is it possible to do this
My PC is just about clogged up with stuff.
Bob

Not sure about completely cloning your existing fixed hard drive onto your new external one although it probably can be done. I know that I wish I had done something like that as sorting out all my original program disks including Windows and then loading them on to my new fixed hard drive was a pain in the proverbial.

When I copied my files onto my external hard drive I first arranged them into folders on my existing fixed hard drive then I simply copied the folders one at a time from my fixed HD onto my external hard drive.

Perhaps someone cleverer than me can explain how to clone a complete drive.

Bob, take a look at this site it might provide the answer:

www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=418

You probably all know this, perhaps.

But you should also export your family tree to a gedcom file, so that you can back this up too.

You can use this gedcom file to import the data into other software too.

Periodical backups are recommended, but are unfortunately something we all put on the long finger until it is too late.

Other thing when buying a hard-drive, I always stick to WD (Western Digital) or maybe Seagate, found these to be more reliable than others I have tried.

Your computer contains thousands of filed and manually copying a handful over to another drive is only playing as it is easy to miss something important.

Far better to install a proper back-up program and run this on a regular basis, than trying to do things manually.

I am currently experimenting with a program called Backup4all which came free with Issue 93 (August) of Your Family Tree Magazine. This allows you to create back-up schedules which can include as few or as many files as you wish - even an entire disk - and run either manually or automatically whenever you wish. The output can be zipped to save space and automatically restored to the original location as the click of a button.

There are also other programs which will allow you to take an image of your disk i.e. clone it - which in theory will allow you to recover your entire operating system, programs et al - but I have not tried any of these as yet.

Do be careful using sticks and CD's as these can fail. Especially take heed of Paulines post re removing sticks correctly. The problem with CD's is that they can be unreliable and fail to burn correctly every now and again.

Is it possible to back up "Bookmarks" on my main screen?
I can't even see how I can print them out.

lets hope this site dont go down,or we will all be in trouble!
I too have lost information, having 3 computers on the go is a real problem.
I print everything off and place in folders in a storage box. Great for family members who are not on the internet. Christmas time is spent with them exploring the box while I start on the snowball bottle :)

thanks for al thesuggestions, chaps(and chappess's)

will give them a serious perusal. thanks again
Jonesy, most interesting article.....
Bob

Now I know why I keep nothing on the computer, it is on hard copy....slow, but safe.