Is Your Genealogy Family History Backed Up and Safe?

Recently this story appeared on a British website Burglars steal a laptop holding family history

It seems a local chauffeur had his home broken into and several items stolen. Among the stolen items was a laptop which contained a 12-year family history project which his father, aged 87, had been working on. 

And you guessed it, there were no backup copies. Ouch! 

The prudent thing to do is protect your genealogy research! Back it up in a cloud storage site, on a flash drive, on an external hard drive, or wherever. Make more than one copy and don't have them all in one home. Give one to your brother or sister or son or daughter or a friend. 

That way if you have a fire or flood or are burgled, all your family data will not be lost. Remember that old adage - don't put all your eggs in one basket

That holds true for genealogy research and family tree data as well. Keep it safe and don't lose what you have probably spent years compiling.

I use Drobox and Bitcasa as my cloud storage and I also have Western Digital MyBookLive for a personal cloud storage system networked to all my laptops and computers. 

As well I have Western Digital Passports for a portable external hard drive system where I can store my files. You can read my review of all of these at Five Cloud Storage Services Revisited

I also like to create  books on Shutterfly which hold a summary of the family ancestors along with photos and scanned documents. I keep one copy for myself and gift other copies to my children and siblings. The more places I can put my family trees the more chance they will survive. 

If you've never created a book using Shutterfly you may want to watch my Shutterfly video tutorials showing how at Creating a Memory Book - Video Tutorials 

Credits: image of burglar by chanpipat  and image of "Cloud Computing Devices" by ddpavumba on FreeDigitalPhotos.net
 

Procrastination, My Word For the Day and a Lesson Learned

My Western Digital My Book Live 2TB Personal Cloud Storage has not been co-operating with my Mac laptop for several months. I can access MyBookLive from my Windows main computer but not from my Mac. 

Yes I've been meaning to check into the problem and fix it..... because that is where I do my backups of important files. MyBookLive is like having your personal cloud computing system and it's really very cool. 

Of course I also have external cloud services. The two I use daily are Dropbox and Bitcasa. But I don't do a complete backup with them because I don't put private or confidential information in the cloud. 

So MyBookLive which I have password protected, is where my monthly backups live. Except I haven't done any monthly backups in, well, months! Lately my Mac has been overheating. It gets so hot I think I could fry eggs on it. This morning I booked an appointment at the nearest Genius Bar (which happens to be a 2 hour drive each way...)

Of course they strongly suggest you backup your computer before bringing it in. That's a wise precaution and I have a feeling my Mac will be staying for some in-depth work, so I do want to back it up. That was a problem so I got to work on fixing MyBookLive.

Well, long story short, that has not been easy nor completely successful. I've managed to fix it enough that I can manually transfer files from my Mac to MyBookLive. That's a tedious and very slow process!

But I cannot use Mac's built in Time Machine to transfer (which would get everything and be far less tedious) because my very poor Internet connection via satellite, will not connect to Western Digital to allow for firmware updates. And without that update, Time Machine can't connect to MyBookLive and start the transfer. 

If I'd begun solving this problem when it first arose I would not be in this mess. 

Procrastination. Yep that's my word for the day. I'm going to write 100 lines of "I will not procrastinate". Well, maybe I'll write it out tomorrow.....


Credits: Image by Stuart Miles on FreeDigitalPhotos.net

New Year's Eve Celebrations

I've been thinking about New Years' Celebrations I've been part of over the past few decades. It's interesting how things change. In my 20s and 30s, it was all about getting invited to a New Year's Eve party. Which basically was an excuse for people to get quite drunk and for men to plant sloppy kisses on you at midnight.

The last New Year's Eve drunk party I went to was many years ago. One of the women drank so much that she stripped to her underwear and ran out and rolled in the snow. Dozens of men happily chased her and helped her roll around. I remember watching and thinking "What the heck am I doing here??!!!" That was the last time I accepted an invite to a New Year's Eve party. Or maybe it was the last time I was invited. I was looked upon as a party pooper. I always disappeared when things were getting out of hand.

Pen Twin Theatre

In any case I was happier not going, and so a new tradition began with my brother and his family spending New Year's Eve at our home. We'd order in Chinese Food and go out to watch a bad movie. That's right. A bad movie. Preferably a comedy.  My brother and his wife loved going to the movie theatre in the very small town near us. The theatre was an old curved metal Quanset Hut.  And it was never crowded, a fact which amazed them since they lived in the big city of Toronto.

After about 10 years of venturing out to watch our movies, we began renting them (remember those days?) and bringing them home so we could just stay home and eat our Chinese Food and watch our funny (bad) movie from the comfort of our living room. 

This tradition continued for about 25 or more years but when my brother remarried, it changed. I'm not complaining - his new wife had her own traditions and it seemed perfectly natural that they would shift to her New Year's Eve celebrations with her family.

So for the last 12 or so years, hubs and I have quietly watched the New Year arrive.  We still order in Chinese Food and watch a movie. The last few years we've watched one on our Smart TV either through NetFlix or Cinema Now.  How times change!

Actually the last time we both managed to stay awake long enough to watch the ball drop in Times Square was 2004.  In fact in the year 2000 I watched it alone, waiting for something apocalyptic to happen, while hubs snored in bed. Last year hubs saw midnight alone as I was tired and went to bed!

Funny thing - this year we forgot. We had Chinese Food on December 30th because we forgot that the next day was New Year's Eve. It didn't matter, we ate leftovers. At 6 p.m. No more eating Chinese Food at 9 o'clock at night!

Then we watched a movie (yes it was bad - Tom Cruise in a badly acted and written Mission Impossible movie) using my Western Digital Passport external hard drive plugged into the USB port of our Smart TV.  More changes. The movie was over at 9:30 and by 10 we were both in bed asleep!

So there you have it - how my New Year's Eve Celebrations have changed drastically over the decades. Funny thing is I enjoy them more now than I did when it was a wild and crazy evening.

2013 image by Simon Howden, courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos
Pen Twin Theatre image by Roloff