Backing up your genealogy data

By now you’ve all heard about 3-2-1 computer backup. Having three copies of your data makes sense, but this relies on knowing where your data is in the first place. Is everything on your computer? What about the external drive in the closet? Or the SD cards in the drawer? Is some of your data in a cloud application, and what happens to that data if you forget to pay the subscription? I call this problem “Data Scatter” and it is the enemy of the 3-2-1 backup model. It’s hard to back up all your data if the primary copies are scattered everywhere. Let’s walk through the problem and we’ll propose a few things you can do to reign in your data and give the 3-2-1 backup model a fighting chance.

Have you ever wondered if you're missing out on how some genealogists are using tools such as Evernote, Microsoft Word or Excel, Google and more? Learn what's hot in the world of apps and websites and how you can start using them! We'll review a group of familiar apps and…

Tired of keeping your genealogy research data on multiple CDs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives and in different locations? Cloud computing & the practice of storing data on a remote server & is a practical solution for genealogists. In this webinar learn how cloud computing works, compare the latest cloud…

Are you familiar with Dropbox - a program that provides 2 gigabytes of online storage for free? Learn how to sign up for Dropbox, install the program and get started ensuring the safety and security of your genealogy research data. Seems too good to be true, right? Two gigabytes of…

Over the last 8 years, Backblaze has collected, analyzed, and reported on hard drive and SSD failure. Andy Klein has waded through 166 million records to learn all he can about drive failure and he'd like to share that with you. For example, do different drive models fail at different rates, do bigger drives fail more often, does temperature impact drive failure, and maybe most important - can you predict drive failure. We’ll also compare consumer versus enterprise drives and wrap up by comparing hard drives to SSDs. Join us for a class of what you can really learn from failure – drive failure that is.

Are you doing everything you can to safeguard your genealogical research? Your documents? Your data? Your scanned images? We will talk about the importance of taking charge of your own materials and making sure they aren't going to disappear.

While artificial intelligence won’t help you find specific records for genealogical research, AI can summarize the record sets you should consult for your search. Learn how to construct effective prompts and queries to return the best information on a record set.

Artificial intelligence can assist in constructing a summary of a document or genealogy record. AI can generate summary text in various formats that you can then add to your research.

While you won’t be able to find genealogy-related records using artificial intelligence, you will be able to use AI to learn more about an ancestor’s “social history.” Social history details how an ancestor lived including where they lived, their occupation, the cost of goods and services, and why they may have migrated to or from a location. Social history “fills in the dash” between an ancestor’s birth date and death date.