Avoiding Genealogical Disaster
Mar
20
2013
Hurricane Sandy 2012 (Photo credit: charliekwalker)
What would you do if your genealogy nook, corner, office was suddenly gone? Disaster Preparedness is not something that genealogists often think about. Often times we’re too busy wrapped up in our pursuit of that long lost family member.
Rewind 4 months…
Late October was beautiful. I spent two days attending The Genealogy Event in New York City and even had a wonderful dinner in the village on Saturday night October 27th. The weather was balmy and everyone was enjoying the last hurrah before our weather would turn much cooler.
Monday, October 29, 2012. This is a day that will be forever etched in my daughters’ memories. Many of us in the New York metropolitan area got a hefty “up close and personal” dose of Mother Nature. While my house didn’t suffer a loss of no more than a few roof shingles and power for six days, unfortunately many other coastal residents weren’t so lucky. My sister who lives just a half-mile from me lost the entire contents of her basement due to the tidal surge flooding. It is hard to imagine the loss of whole rooms of items, lifetime of accumulations, complete and utter devastation to our lives. To be honest, in genealogy we rarely talk about preparing for disasters until it’s too late.
How important is your genealogical collection to you?
I know my papers, books, and errata are integral parts to the success of my business as well as my own personal research. So today’s question is… If you were to lose your research library today, how would you rebuild it? First, do you have a listing of all books on your shelves? If you do, you get a gold star in my book.
However, if you’ve answered “NO”, then your first step to take… compile an inventory *today* by utilizing free, online tools: LibraryThing, GoodReads, and Google Books’ My Library. Each of these offers slightly different cataloging capabilities, but provides a viable method of recovery should the need arise. Review each to see how it can fit into your needs/uses. My genealogical library is online at LibraryThing. Well, 98% of it is…
What about your computer files?
This one is critical folks! What would you do if your computer suddenly quit. Finis. Kaputt. Would you have the means to recover your important data, pictures and audio files?
Create a regular back-up plan. Dick Eastman reminds his subscribers on the 1st of every month to back-up, both on-site and off-site, or in the cloud. For me, on-site means copying files to a jump-drive and putting in a secure container. I opt to do off-site back-ups “to the cloud” via an account with Carbonite. At this point, my account contains 26.5 GB comprising of 41,496 files. A quick check tells me that My Pictures folder is 18.9 GB or 71% of the files I back up regularly. Wow!!
While I still struggle with my paper files, I made a goal hold “scanning” parties with my Mom to organize and digitize our 20+ years of research. Will we finish anytime soon? Probably not, but I’ll feel much better to have started and work towards completion of this very important genealogical goal.
What about you? What will you do to safeguard your genealogical investments?
