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
 

Five Cloud Storage Services Revisited

In 2011 I wrote about cloud storage and the different free cloud services available. It's at Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining for those who want to have a look. Time for an update!

Here is a list of 5 free Cloud Storage services you might want to try:

1. Dropbox. This is my all-time favourite. With Dropbox I can store, sync, and, share files online for free. Not all cloud services will sync. If that's not important to you, don't worry about it. But I like to have at least one service that will automatically sync my uploaded files to all my devices. You get 2 GB of free space but you can get more with referrals. If you still need more you can always subscribe to Dropbox Pro, available in 100 GB, 200 GB, and 500 GB plans. You can even get more than 500GB with their Business Plan.

2. Google Drive. 15 GB of free space plus the use of Google spreadsheets and docs makes this a great choice.  I use Google Drive quite a bit and it's easy to share editing of files with others.

3. Bitcasa: 10 GB of free storage and surprisingly, for $99.00 a year you can have unlimited storage with their Infinite Plan. I like this option very much and am probably going to sign up for Infinite.

4. Amazon Cloud Drive: 5GB of free storage. I use this for genealogy certificates.

5. SugarSync: 5GB of free storage makes this another option. You can pay for 60GB, 100GB or 250GB plans if 5GB isn't enough for you

I haven't included SkyDrive as I don't care for it. But lots of people do use it and you can get 7 GB of storage so you might want to check it out too.

Let's talk about having your own personal cloud storage and external hard drive systems. I use Western Digital MyBookLive which hooks up to your home network and gives you your own private cloud storage. It's easy to drop files into it and it also creates a backup of your computer hard drive.  I bought the 2TB version at Amazon and there is a 3TB version available too. The WD My Book Live 2TB is on sale, down from $164.99 to $109.99 while the WD My Book Live 3TB is down from $199.99 to $153.98

It's a bit of work setting it up but once you do, it's easy to use. You can even set up different folders for different family members and can password protect the folders if you wish.

I also use the WD My Passport 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage. In fact I have three of them! I can't live without them. They range in size from 3TB down to 320 GB so there's bound to be one that suits you. These are also your own private storage but the beauty is their portability.  The size is 4 x 1 x 3 inches! I have all my genealogy photos and documents on one and I can take it with me to plug into a relative's tv (if they have a USB port) or their computer to share with them

Hopefully these ideas will help you if you're struggling with what cloud service or what type of external back up system to use.

Credits: "Computer Computing Global Social Networks" by KROMKRATHOG on FreeDigitalPhotos.net