Hope you're looking forward to a fun weekend!

Whatever your family history goals, remember to include plans for failure & loss. This might mean calling a family member and recording a memory before they're gone. It might mean photographing a residence before a move. Or adequately citing a resource before your subscription to a database expires. In my case...

I took a pause from digitizing family records because before I toss/give away the originals (which is my goal) I want to make sure I won't lose the digital scans. So, if anyone needs a reminder or refresher, here's How to Create a 3-2-1 Plan for your records. All hard drives fail eventually so we should have:

3 copies of our data on at least

2 distinct local devices and then

1 offsite device (Backblaze, Carbonite, Google Drive, Amazon Drive, etc)

I have several friends who have lost EVERYTHING (it's in the blog). One due to robbery, one to a house fire, and one to a computer failure. So, as un-fun as preparing for disasters is, and preparing for loss does slow down the work, I'm taking the time to make sure I've done my best to protect my work.

My 3-2-1 plan looks like this:

3 copies (my computer hard drive, an external hard drive I can grab in an emergency, a TimeMachine back up in my basement that backs up my computer 24/7)

2 distinct devices (my computer harddrive and the separate external hard drive)

1 offsite (I use BackBlaze to backup my computer and one external hard drive)

And I'm so paranoid about losing all my hard work, I store the external hard drive in doubled-up Faraday bags (to protect from solar flares or EMPs which would destroy electronics). I get them from www.techprotectbag.com This may be an unnecessary step but it gives me peace of mind.

And I should add, I'm not a techie and I've made mistakes and I've lost computer files. I went with Backblaze for my offsite storage (this is not an advertisement or affiliate link) because they made it simple enough for me to understand. They do the hard work on their end and can give tech support if needed. A word to the wise, there's no point digitizing everything if we don't have a way to secure our digital scans.

New Listings this week and in the next few weeks will be MyHeritage subscription collections (an affiliate program). You can visit the site to see the latest listings. I'll be adding them as quickly as possible for those who prefer to let a professional service do the hard work--use any MyHeritage link to search for an ancestor's name and see if the subscription collections offer you any value before you decide to subscribe.

You can always search at OnGenealogy by location and find both free and subscription listings.

Best with your family history work!

Alyson

OnGenealogy