Sunday, January 3, 2010

New Years Resolution: Backup Data Regularly

It's been a full month since my last post (and a few of those I created in advance); it was a hectic time, but I'm back and ready for a few serious research trips. Yea! It's time for our annual holiday trip back to the good old U.S. of A. and I'm getting all my papers together and have updated RootsMagic for all the new information I hope to gather.

But before I actually fly out of here - most importantly - it's time for a backup. I have good intentions for monthly backups, but that doesn't always happen. But I get nervous when it's time for travel, worrying that something will happen to my computer en route; so I break out an old external hard drive, and back up both our systems, just in case. The hard drive is big enough that I can just copy one system to the other, but soon, that won't be possible; I'm gathering too many big files, so researching new backup systems is on my to do list.

I know my system isn't top of the line, and nothing is completely foolproof - but it is a backup of all the really important files - and I can recreate it (with time) if needed. I hope you have a system for backing up your files - as an old programmer told me once, "It's not a matter of IF you'll need a backup file, it's WHEN!"