Jim Panttaja’s Genealogy Research

I had a near catastrophe this weekend. I was navigating through my Family Tree Maker file, and got an error message saying that my data was corrupt, and I needed to go to the backup file. Family Tree Maker regularly creates such a file. But that file was also damaged. Yikes. I have done a lot of work over the last year - and the idea of losing my file was devastating. I regularly (perhaps once a month) make a copy of the file to CD. But I also have just started using TimeMachine on my Mac (yes, Family Tree Maker only runs on PCs, so I am running it under Parallels on my Mac).

It turns out that the file had been damaged for four days. But I pulled a back up from five days ago, copied in to the right place, and all was good. So I only lost the changes that I had made in the last five days. Fortunately, I hadn’t made many. And whenever find something on the web, I print to PDF, and save it in a directory. So I could easily check timestamps, and see those things I had worked on over the last five days.

But it is a lesson - backup often. Fortunately, I use TimeMachine now which updates every hour. But if you aren’t using TimeMachine on a Mac, consider copying your files to a CD (or DVD) once a month or once a week.