I wanted to take a quick moment to address the most recent comment, which was
I've had a few people ask me about the danger of going paperless over the last few years and this latest comment prompted me to address the question with a larger audience. The assumption here is that paper is safer for keeping records and research. The truth is, no matter how you store your research and documents, the most important thing to ensure your ability to access these files is not the primary method you use for storage as much as the back up plan.
Take it from someone who lost everything in a house fire and whose parents lost many family photos in a flooded basement - paper has it's own set of issues.
The key to any system is to know the limitations of the system you have set up and plan for the bad things that will inevitably happen. If you are using a paper based system, consider keeping an additional copy "off site." This means outside of your home, so if you have a catastrophic issue in your home, you can rely on those off site back ups to recover some, if not all, of your research.
Going paperless doesn't mean you get a pass on thinking about backup solutions. The commenter above was right in that you could lose everything very quickly if you have a single copy sitting on your home computer and something happens to that machine.
I always point people to the 3-2-1 genealogy backup plan which breaks down as follows:
Hard copy my man. Had recently had a Ransomware attacker hit my computer wanted $1400.00 I lost everything all my notes on my PAF5 and the PAF5 itself always use a Hard Copy in binders in this day an age
I've had a few people ask me about the danger of going paperless over the last few years and this latest comment prompted me to address the question with a larger audience. The assumption here is that paper is safer for keeping records and research. The truth is, no matter how you store your research and documents, the most important thing to ensure your ability to access these files is not the primary method you use for storage as much as the back up plan.
Take it from someone who lost everything in a house fire and whose parents lost many family photos in a flooded basement - paper has it's own set of issues.
The key to any system is to know the limitations of the system you have set up and plan for the bad things that will inevitably happen. If you are using a paper based system, consider keeping an additional copy "off site." This means outside of your home, so if you have a catastrophic issue in your home, you can rely on those off site back ups to recover some, if not all, of your research.
Going paperless doesn't mean you get a pass on thinking about backup solutions. The commenter above was right in that you could lose everything very quickly if you have a single copy sitting on your home computer and something happens to that machine.
I always point people to the 3-2-1 genealogy backup plan which breaks down as follows:
- Always store at least 3 copies of your files
- on at least 2 different types of media
- with 1 backup being off site
The key here is multiple repositories... multiple media types means if one type of media goes out of favor (think cassettes - yes they used to be used for saving computer data too!) you have another option and can create a new backup on whatever the latest and greatest media is. An off site backup is crucial to any backup plan. I suggest storing things in the cloud using a cloud service like OneDrive or Dropbox, but you could also look at a full backup solution like iDrive if you want to take things a step further and do a full offsite backup of all the files on your computer.
The bottom line here is, as I said, don't be lulled into a false sense of security thinking your method of saving data is more safe than another. The truth is they all have their downfalls. If you want to be sure to be able to get to that data at a later date, you need to save it in multiple places, multiple ways and make sure one of those copies is as far from where you are as possible.
