Jim Panttaja’s Genealogy Research

This note isn’t really relevant here – but, I thought you might care about what I do for a living. Mary and I have been at RebelVox for over three years now (That helps to explain how few posts there have been here for awhile). The application we have been working on, Voxer, is now available at the App Store if you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Download

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.