Backing up files

[LizzieB]

Hi Malcolm,

One more sleep to go. Let you know. Lizzie

[LizzieB]

Malcolm ........ G O N E! Liz

[Mutley]

Hi Malcolm,

One more sleep to go. Let you know. Lizzie

Time to wake up.....

[DorothySandra]

LizzieB - I have no advice, just hearfelt sympathy. I hope you can retrieve the data.

[LizzieB]

Hi Dorothy/Malcolm. No .... gone ...... cannot be retrieved. As devastated as I am, I have already started over. Fortunately I don't have to send away for BMD certs again and had kept a heck of a lot of profiles I'd printed off to work on early on and other hand-written details from visits to the local LDS centre when I was starting out. Thank you for your kind wishes. LizzieB

[Ed McKie]

Forlorn hope perhaps--the wayback machine has archived Ancestry pages. latest are 2009. I could not get on today so have no idea if the archive contained the family trees- but it has to be worth the try.

cheers..ed

[Mutley]

Commiserations, it must be dreadful
but I am glad that you feel able to start again, this time learning the lesson of looking after your own stuff and maybe helping others, reading this thread, to consider just where all their hard work is stored.

Good luck

[LittleSpark]

I've always used Family Tree Maker and never had problems doing back-ups until the computer crashed last year and we bought a new one with Windows 7.
I'm not very computer literate so my daughter backs up my Tree. Since having Windows 7 we've encountered many problems which we didn't have with XP.
Whenever she does a back-up now on to a disc, the actual programme is wiped from the computer (everything disappears) and then she has to reinstall a back-up from the disc she's just done. We cannnot 'look' at the disc either. With XP we could look at the copy which was 'read only'.
It's very frustrating and fear that one of these days when she does a copy I will lose everything altogether!

XP was so much easier......

Sheila

[arthurk]

I'm not very computer literate so my daughter backs up my Tree. Since having Windows 7 we've encountered many problems which we didn't have with XP.
Whenever she does a back-up now on to a disc, the actual programme is wiped from the computer (everything disappears) and then she has to reinstall a back-up from the disc she's just done. We cannnot 'look' at the disc either. With XP we could look at the copy which was 'read only'.

When I got a new computer with Windows 7 I discovered that the built-in backup facility created files that could only be read back on or imported back to the computer they came from; I may be wrong on this next bit, but I've a feeling they were in some kind of archive format rather than being simple copies of the original files. This wasn't at all what I wanted, so I now back up by simply copying (burning) files on to a CD. This can be done either in Windows or with a CD-burning program, and is very similar to what I used to do in XP.

I don't like the sound of the program being wiped from the computer - unless it's that the back-up utility is set to move files rather than simply copy them. And ideally you should only need to back up the data, not the program itself.

Arthur

[Ms Tarfgi]

I've just acquired Dropbox, on the advice of a more computer-literate nephew. I wanted it mainly to keep my MacBook and my iMac up-to-date with each other. I use it for my photos, my publication work etc as well as my family tree. It has the added benefit of course, of being backed up on their website. I also have a backup on several cds which are in various places"off-site" including the garden shed!

Heartfelt commiserations to LizzieB - what a nightmare!