Make Sure You Back Up Your Work!

-- by Jon --

It is very important to make a backup copy of your work regularly. Even though you are saving your information onto your hard drive, it is important to make a copy of your work somewhere other than your hard drive. It would be a disaster to spend hours and hours on your project and then have your hard drive fail. There is no easy way, and possibly no way at all to get it back if this happens. We never did have our hard drive fail, but sometimes we would inadvertently do something that would lose some of the valuable information that we had been working on. Many of us have deleted files by mistake. I have many personal experiences where I was either extremely happy that I had a backup or I was extremely upset because I didn't.

True Confession: As you probably know, you can mark (highlight) some text and then when you start typing, all that was highlighted would disappear and be replaced by what you typed next. I had highlighted a large portion of my text for some reason and had forgotten that it was still highlighted when I continued typing. Because I was not watching the monitor, all of those pages were replaced with my next key stroke. It had been saved before I found what had happened. I am a firm believer in regular backups.

Backup Methods
CD - If you are in the business of making a CD for family history, then you must already have a CDRW, a CD drive that will both read and write CD's. This was my choice over Zip drives. You can buy re-writable CD's so you don't have to throw away the 'write once only' cd's. But at only 50 cents or less each, I wound up using the write once CD's just as much. CD's have all the room you need for your projects.

There are several other backup methods that are fairly easy to use.

3 1/2 in. Diskettes are the simplest, but do not hold much information. They can be quickly outgrown. You can get software that will span several diskettes, if necessary, including file compressing software like PKZip or Winzip. But you are soon using quite a number of diskettes.

Zip Disks can hold fairly large files and will let you span the disks. I used this for our first project before we got into the business of making CD's. The Zip disks were fairly expensive, like $15 or more each at that time.

Tape Drive Some people have access to tape drives to make backups. They are not as fast to write and are slower to find the lost files you are looking for.