Be Your Own Digital Archivist: Preserve Your Research

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.

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.

Have you ever experienced a data loss when it comes to your genealogy research? Not yet? Well if not, have you prepared for what might happen if your hard drive fails? What if your laptop is lost or stolen? Learn the basics of backing up all your genealogy data including…

There is a treasure trove of untapped research sources online: the electronic book or ebook. Repositories are digitizing publications and putting them online for us to use without having to leave the comfort of our homes. We will explore all the options that are out there to move your research forward.

Everywhere we turn we hear from someone recommending the latest and greatest apps and tools to use in our research. But should we try to use all of them? Some of them? None of them? How do you choose what is best for you? We will go over the research process and help you decide which of your own activities need special tools and which work well with the standard tools we all should use.

Are you still using only the basic search options available on your favorite genealogical research sites? Do you get a lot of less-than-helpful search results? We will explore features and strategies you can use to tighten up the searches and make your online research more productive.

There's a lot to think to about when it comes to deciding how you will store your family tree database. Online? Offline? Both? We will discuss all the options for online trees, software, and apps. And we will go over what things you should be cautious about, including syncing, record…

Sometimes overwhelming to beginners and sometimes underused by veterans, Cyndi's List is a research tool that is robust with resources helpful in everyone's research. Using specific examples for beginners, as well as more advanced researchers, we will explore the site and point out how to make the most of the…

Clicking links means you can start off on a web site for one specific topic and end up dozens of web sites away on many different topics. It’s easy to get lost and lose focus on what you were trying to find in the first place. And with so many…