Saving Your Data and Saving Your Sanity

This isn't per se a genealogy column, but after getting enough messages from correspondents and Webmasters that "my computer crashed. It will be a while before I get back to you" it is time to talk about good computing practices. (It is ALWAYS time to talk about good computing practices.) Since family history is such a data intensive hobby, it's something to harp about now and then. And we’re not even going to get into virus protection in this column.
If you have a computer, you will problems. I have had three different home computers from three different manufacturers. Every one of them suffered a hard drive problem that resulted in the total loss of data on the drive. (The mark of a good hardware company is not whether it has problems. All companies have their lemons. It's how they handle problems that tells you that you should continue to do business with them.) What kept me from losing 30 years of work and jumping out the window, is that I follow good back up-practices. This stems from 17 years of working as a computer journalist and attending disaster prevention talks conducted by professionals.
My wife and I have had tape drives on the last two computers we have owned. Most home users don't have tape drives, and they are merely one method of backing up your data (and we'll explore the other options), but boy, they have been life savers. It's comforting to know when you are performing last rites for a hard drive, that all your data is waiting to be restored on this tape cartridge that fits into the palm of your hand. I admit, the first time I did this, it took a real leap of faith to believe the process will actually work.
Although I’m singing the praises of tape cartridges and tape drives, it’s clear from visiting the Dell Computer Web site that tapes drives are getting very hard to buy if you’re a regular consumer. They are being offered primarily for high-volume corporate users. The hardware manufacturers are pushing rewritable CDs and Zip disks as the storage devices for the typical user. Nevertheless, I’ll give our practice and you can apply what you can to your choice of device and media.
You can pick your device, and your degree of diligence, but you do need to pick a process that you follow regularly. It's like rescue workers simulating disastrous auto accidents--you need to have a process in place before things go wrong. Companies with computer staffs have standard procedures. Back ups are performed every day, usually after the close of business hours. Tapes are rotated. Old tapes are stored off-site. Now, my wife and I don't do daily back ups, but we do them at least monthly. If my computer went down, I might lose all the changes I've made in the last three weeks, but I won't lose all the data I've accumulated in a lifetime.
The important lesson is that data is more important than equipment or applications. You can replace your computer. You can replace your software. If your house burns, you can replace your home. YOU CANNOT REPLACE YOUR DATA.
The basic principal of disaster planning and recovery is what I call "The Spare Tire Approach." Carry a spare. Make sure the spare works. I have three sets of tapes. One sits next to the computer. One is in my desk drawer at work. One of the basic rules of disaster recovery planning is that if you have a back-up medium, like a floppy disk or a tape cartridge, and it sits on your desk next to your home computer, if you house burns, the data is also destroyed. And the third is in a bank safety deposit box. We are immune to about everything short of a 100-megaton atomic hit on New York City.
Since I do not operate a business, I don't rotate tapes as regularly as I should. But I do rotate them. And if you think this is overkill, talk to people who have lived in towns that have suffered major floods. Your business and your home can be destroyed by the same natural disaster. Because I work in Manhattan and lived in Northern New Jersey, I figure this will not happen, since the weather problems and topographies are varied. You have to know what is likely in your area. If I lived in California, I'd have a tape in some other section of the country. (And that's what big business does. It has duplicate copies of data in different cities.)
Besides rotating your storage medium, you need to test it. Make sure you can save your data and retrieve it after it has been stored. I've had floppy disks come out of the bank vault that had a file that I had saved suddenly show that it held ZERO kilobytes of data. I've had tape cartridges go bad, so suddenly my supply of three is down to two. The tape drive can go bad and the wisdom in the business is that you destroy an average of three tapes before you realize the problem.
Tape cartridges are great because of the volume of data they can hold. My current generation holds 10 gigabytes of uncompressed and that doubles to as much as 20 gigabytes if you need it. Since all of the data on my computer takes up about 263 megabytes, this is plenty. What I do, is I back up all my data, not just the changes. And I simply add new versions to the tape. I don't erase the old ones. I label each back up with the date I made it so I know when every single back up was made and I can go back to older versions of files in case I find something missing in a new version. The other beauty of tape cartridges, is that your select the stuff you want copied, start the process, and you can return when it's done. You look to see if the system reports any problems. The most usual error is that a file has been left open and the system won't copy open files. (I also look carefully at the instructions I gave the system. I’ve found that I thought I selected 253MBs to copy, but somehow I checked a wrong box and I only checked files containing 8MBs. Computers are dumb. They only do what you tell them to do.)
Getting ready to copy your files.
The basic starting point for saving data is having your files well organized in the first place. My wife and I store all our data files in folders that are nested inside a folder called “BobFiles” (you should create your own obviously), which is nested inside a folder called My Documents. “BobFiles” contains our word processing files, spreadsheet, database, and Powerpoint files. When I want to copy my files, I simply put a check into the box next to “BobFiles” and everything inside is copied without having to check off individual files or folders. Of course, I can check off individual files if I want. Whatever you do, don’t do what a lot of people do at work and store your files inside the application so that you always have to check them off one by one. And, you end up having to go to Word, and Excel, and Access to copy all your data. And separately to your family history application. (I keep most of my data in word processing files. I generally don’t use gedcoms.)
Whatever media you chose, label them disk or the tape or the CD with the date it was made and a general statement of what it contains.
Here are some other storage options.
Floppy disks. If you have less than 5MB of data, you can probably get away with using floppy disks and their 1.44K of individual disk capacity. As your data grows, it's gets clunkier keeping track of these. They do fit well in a shirt pocket, and a desk drawer, so they can be kept as a spare away from your home. Obviously, you can simply drag and drop everything to the a: drive via Windows Explorer in order to save files, so this is a fairly fast technique. (The advice for organizing your files comes into play here also. Next your data files into one master file and you can drag and drop in one stroke, if you have the capacity.)
Zip Drives. You can get these built-in to most home computers these days, and these are simply drives that read a high-capacity magnetic disk. There are two disk capacities, 100MB and 250MB. For a lot of folks, this probably enough (not for a long-timer like myself with tons of genealogy and a wife whose work is computer related) You can simply store to the drive. Again, these are easy to carry, so you can slip them into a corner of your desk drawer or into a safety deposit box. The big advantage of these over tape cartridges is retrieval time. The tape cartridge has to position itself at the place it’s supposed to start and then it has to find the file (just like winding through an audio tape.) A Zip drive has random access in the same way a floppy drive does. You simply pick the file you want and the computer finds it on the drive without reading all the other files. My friends tell me this is great for photo files. The big advantage of Zip drives over tape is that you can store and retrieve much more quickly. The big advantage of tape is capacity. There are other removable magnetic storage devices with Jaz drives, but Zips are the most widely available.
CD-RW. Drives that allow you to create your own CDs are increasingly common. These are great if you have a lot of data. CD-RW disks are compact disks that can be rewritten repeatedly, just like you do with a floppy drive. Two years ago, when we bought our last computer, these were just coming on the market and most CDs couldn’t be rewritten after the first data was burned in. I want one on my next home computer at home (along with a flat panel monitor.) Since CDs have 650MB capacity on each disk, you are unlikely to publish anything that will fill them. CD-RW drives are a bargain right now. You can get them as the first drive in your CD bay or add them as a second drive if you already had a CD-ROM or DVD drive. Dell’s prices ranged from about $79 to $199, depending on configurations and models. I think that’s a bargain. Can you afford to have one? Get one of these or a Zip drive, unless you’re really cheap and you are buying computers that come installed with Microsoft Works instead of Office and Word (and then shame on you, you’re not saving enough to justify buying a second-rate product.)
Publish to the Web. This isn't normally thought of as a back-up procedure. But it really is. You are creating copies that are stored on somebody else's server, hopefully in another state. One of the reasons I periodically create biographies on the Genconnect sites is that it gives me a virtually indestructible copy of my work, while allowing me to share it widely. My format is really a mini-genealogy since I include the highlights of a person's life and the names and vital data for their children. You can do the same thing by filing Gedcoms with various services like ancestry.com, although Gedcoms don't provide enough data for my taste. Paper. The old standby has its uses. Print out copies of things and file them. Put them in binders. Send copies to other researchers. (Don't send them everything. In another column, I'll talk about how to minimize stealing...er borrowing.) Typing stuff back in is a lot better than losing data.
Another Computer: If you have two computers at home and you have spare capacity, keep copies of your files on each of them. When we got our new computer, we kept our old one, and there are old versions of most of my family history files on them. It would be fairly easy to get both in sync, I just haven’t done it. My advice is invest in a product called LapLink. You can connect the two computers by a cable (you can also do it by modem) and transfer data in an automated fashion. When we got the new computer, we used LapLink to transfer all the data files. It took less than 10 minutes and I didn’t have to worry about whether I’d copied everything or where the files were copied to. If you can store a few files on your work computer (without getting into trouble), that can help.
Online Services: I use America Online as a temporary storage system. I do this with my work files, rather than get involved in saving files to the server. At the end of the day, I send all the files that I am actively working on from my work computer to my home computer as individual attachments. Sometimes I don’t even download them. I simply delete the older versions as I post new ones. One time, when I thought my drive was crashing at home, I sent a whole bunch of stuff to my work address as e-mail on AOL to buy time. The good thing about AOL is that you can access it from the Internet, so I can download them when I’m on the road from any public computer (or the kind you pay for at hotels and airports). Obviously, you’re not likely to do this with dozens of files. But it gives you an option if you have an emergency. And a lot of times, you can tell from performance and sounds that a drive is about the crash.
Internet-based Document Storage. The publishing to the Web procedure I mentioned is taking advantage of the system, but that's not really designed for online storage. You don't want to eat up some Webmaster's server capacity. Online storage is probably the wave of the future, but it's not readily available to most hobbyists at this point, at least I'm not quite ready to pay for it. There are two forms here. Data storage and document storage. Document storage is new, but it is going to explode professional markets. Accountants, for example, will be able to store client tax returns via the Internet so that banks can access them when making loans. Being able to store and access personal documents is not that far away. (By document storage, I mean using something like Adobe Acrobat. You can read the documents, but you can’t edit them.)
Internet-based data storage, simply storing files and retrieving them, is already available. Can you imagine your document while you're killing time on the road and working on a family file? But it's probably not worth it if it's just a hobby. I just saw one service that is $9.95 per month for Internet-based storage of 250MB of data, so maybe it's not that far away. And such services can automatically back up your computer while you are sleep. However, it looks to me like on most services you have to pay for extras, like money for a monthly CD of your data, which you may not need, and which costs two or three times as much as the monthly storage.

Online Genealogical Workshop