Genealogy Records Disaster

An article in the Corsicana (Texas) Daily Sun caught my eye. It seems that Gary Richards, who grew up in Corsicana but has lived in Louisiana for about 10 years, had a sad experience when he had to evacuate his house near Lake Ponchartrain, where the levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina.

Richards borrowed a friend’s car and had to leave his computers and many valuable genealogical items behind, hoping that the house would withstand storms as in the past. He headed to his parents' home in Corsicana and stayed there for some time. When he returned to his house in October, hoping for the best, there had been eight and one-half feet of water on his street and five feet of water in the house itself. Every stick of furniture had been destroyed, along with his 3,000 books.

Richards' computers were ruined although some of his genealogy records on paper were salvageable.

You can read the full story at http://www.corsicanadailysun.com/news/local_story_164093825.html.

This sad story should be a lesson for the rest of us. Do you have backups of your paper as well as your computer files? Do you have copies saved off-site in a safe place? After all, if disaster strikes, the backups you keep in your house will be destroyed at the same time your computer or other paper records are destroyed. The safest backup is one that is stored some distance away.

For a long time I kept backups from my home computer in a desk drawer at the office and backups of the office computer in a drawer at home. Looking back, I now think that was foolish. A widespread disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, could easily destroy both.

I now keep backups of my most critical files off-site through a service that automatically makes backups every few hours across the Internet. Today my backups are stored about 2,500 miles away.

Perhaps now is the time to re-think your backup process, before disaster strikes. You might want to consider what happened to Gary Richards’ computer and his 3,000 books. Then make your plans accordingly.

Comments

[Mary Putman]

What a tragedy! The Highnote family, for which I have searched all descendants for 37 years, has been the Corsicana area since 1847. I corresponded years ago with members of that family in Navarro County, who shared all kinds of records with me, as I did with them. I wish Mr. Richards well in trying to reconstruct his data and books. I lost a box of letters and files when we moved in 1993 and, if not for Ancestry.com, I would never have been able to document that material again.

[W. David Samuelsen]

I have been copying just about everything from the old 3.5 diskettes to the portable external hard drive that I can take in an hurry. Still more even older ones I found to be un-usable now. Whatever were in those lost diskettes are lost. All the reasons for keeping up with the technology.

[Cheri Casper]

I scan and attach copies of all documents with the source record in my database. I back my database up to an external hard drive. In case of disaster, I will have all of my genealogy intact on my small, book sized external hard drive, including all document images. However, even given the massive size of my database and my "genealogy folder" (all photos, document images, etc.), I could still fit all of it on a thumb drive. There is no excuse for anyone losing any data to any disaster given the increasing size of small storage devices.

[Diane Kennedy]

Could you please supply the names of some services that will store and update files?
Thank you so much.
Diane Kennedy

[Dick Eastman]

There are several online backup services available. The one that I use is called Mozy. It automatically backs up your computer about every two hours as long as it is turned on and connected to the Internet.

Mozy is free of charge for about to two gigabytes of storage. If that is not enough storage space for you, the company charges $4.95 a month for unlimited storage space.

You can read the article I wrote about Mozy at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2006/12/unlimited_onlin.html

There are other online services although I have not used all of them myself and am not as familiar with the others.

- Dick Eastman

[Norman Walker]

I use Amazon's S3. I'm only charged for the amount I store a month (a little over a gig) and a transfer rate. I have been paying less than a dollar a month for this mirrored service.

[Marjorie]

Drivesavers.com -- they claim they can restore data from almost any drive, no matter what the disaster. This includes fires, floods, and other disasters. Naturally, it's not cheap, but they are highly successful (no personal experience other than their presentations at a user group, and the stories of others).

[Stephen Evans, the-freelance-editor]

I've used Acpana's Data Deposit Box since the triple hurricanes of 2004 hit Orlando. They've just recently raised their rate to $2 per month, minimum (which I believe is for 2gig), and the service is great. An easy-to-use interface enables you to select which files on your computer you want to have uploaded; a marked file is then saved as soon as it is closed (my only complaint, really, is that the file *does* have to be closed for it to be transferred). The base rate also includes file sharing capabilities, which I have used on occasion. Highly recommended.

Stephen Evans, the-freelance-editor

[Bill Buchanan]

Considering that Gary Richards' computer data was stored on the hard disk drive of his computer, there is a good chance that his data survived even if the rest of the computer was destroyed. He may not realize that the hard drive is in a sealed box that may (or may not) be water-proof. He should hook it up to a different computer and see whether his data is intact. I have seen other cases where a computer failure due to other causes has led people to assume the worst, but the data was still safe on the hard disk.

Most readers will know that genealogical databases (or ZIPped backups) less than 10 MB in size can be stored for free online by emailing them to yourself on your gmail (or similar) account. That doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the scanned images, but it does protect the database itself.

[Susan Daily]

I also use Mozy for my backups now, and am slowly copying my photos from previous years (on CDs) to my hard drive again so that they will get uploaded in time.

But before I did this, I knew I would always have my database GEDCOM available to me for download if I had a disaster. I upload my tree to Rootsweb's free WorldConnect family tree database. I upload everything, but use the options so that I don't have things show like notes and living people. The additional benefit is I have been contacted by distant cousins and relatives who have found their ancestors in my tree. This is their web site: http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/ . If you use your family tree program to export your file to a GEDCOM, you can then follow the steps to upload your tree.

[Bill Buchanan]

Actually, there are free options for uploading scanned images, too.

Google, for example, allows you to upload 1 GB of images if you have a free Gmail account. http://picasaweb.google.com

1 GB may not sound like much if you have a 8 MPx camera and save your images in TIFF or RAW formats, but a letter-sized document can be saved as a JPEG at 300 dpi (copies printed at 300 dpi look just like the originals) as about a 1 MB file. At that rate 1 GB should store about 1000 images.

Example http://picasaweb.google.com/GenealogistBuchanan

Just a thought.

[Maureen Fallon]

I had DriveSavers retrieve data from a desktop computer. Excellent service! When I was in their office I saw some of the drives they serviced. One drive was severely burned. One drive took a swim in the Amazon River.

[Loreen Wells]

Mozy requires high speed access. Is there any on line service that lets you use dial up?

[Dick Eastman]

If you have several hundred megabytes or more of data to back up, don't even think of trying it by dial-up. You'll be there for a long time, maybe several days. Mozy, S3, and the other automated backup programs are designed to back up lots of files over a broadband connection.

You can find many services that allow you to manually back up a smaller number of files. Yahoo Briefcase is probably the most popular. Or you can simply e-mail files to your own Gmail account. That's crude and manual, but it works well as long as you remember to keep doing it on a regular basis. There's many other such services also.

The automated services, such as Mozy and S3, are great because you "set them and forget them." They have the option to automatically back up your files every few hours without any human interaction required. They will also back up files manually, if you prefer. However, the number and size of the files typically is high enough as to make dial-up connections impractical.

- Dick Eastman

[Coleman Waite]

Many years ago I found an excellent backup service. It's called relatives and friends. I send to my decendents and some distant cousins a copy of my genealogy whether they want it or not.
At first I sent 5 1/4 then 3 1/2, CD's and now DVd's. The family 8 MM movies and VHS tapes take about 7 DVD's in data form. another holds the genealogy and some photo's along with another to hold about 10,000 photos altogether.
This backup service is spread across the country. I had to retrieve a CD once when the "love bug" virus erased all my JPEG's.
I also have uploaded the genealogy to several databases.
It's free, dispersed and available to anyone interested.
The more you give your data and photo's away the safer they are.

Cole Waite