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4 min read

Backing up and protecting your research.

The 3-2-1 rule in plain words, GEDCOM exports that never leave your tree hostage to a subscription, and how to protect living relatives.

A year of research can disappear with one failed hard drive. None of what follows costs much money or much time, and all of it stops that happening.

What to back up.

Keep these together, even if they live in different folders:

  • Your archive folder: the notes, the sources and the claims you have built up, whether that is the skill’s files or your own notebook.
  • Any GEDCOM file you have exported from a tree.
  • Scans or photographs of certificates and documents.
  • Family photographs, especially ones with names or dates on the back.
  • Your written research notes, including the ones marked UNCONFIRMED.

The 3-2-1 rule, in plain words.

Keep three copies of anything you would mind losing. Store them on two different kinds of storage, for example a computer and an external drive. Keep one copy somewhere else entirely, away from your home, such as a cloud service. If your house floods or your laptop is stolen, the offsite copy is the one that survives.

Where to keep the copies.

Your working copy stays on your computer. A second copy belongs on an external drive, kept somewhere separate from the computer itself, not plugged in beside it every day. The third copy goes to a cloud service.

For the cloud copy, look at European-hosted services before the familiar American ones. Proton Drive and Tresorit are both based in Switzerland. pCloud is Swiss-run, though check you have picked its Luxembourg data centre rather than its US one when you sign up. Hetzner Storage Box runs from German and Finnish data centres. A UK reader might prefer one of these because the data stays inside European data-protection law. An American company can be reachable by its home government, whatever country its servers physically sit in.

Exporting a GEDCOM so your tree is never hostage to a subscription.

A GEDCOM is a plain text file that holds people, relationships, events and source citations. Both Ancestry and Findmypast let the tree’s owner export one, but only the owner; an editor added to your tree cannot export it. Photographs and document images are not included. A GEDCOM keeps your facts and their sourcing yours, independent of any subscription, even though your pictures need saving separately from the site’s media gallery.

Export a GEDCOM every so often, not only when you plan to cancel. Treat it as part of your normal backup routine, the same as any other file in your archive folder.

Protecting living people.

Keep details about living relatives out of anything you share widely. A shared tree that names a living cousin’s address, or a cloud folder that anyone with the link can open, is a privacy problem waiting to happen. Restrict what a shared tree shows about the living, the same way the big genealogy sites do by default for anyone but the tree’s owner.

For the cloud copy specifically, encrypt the folder before it leaves your computer. Cryptomator is free and open source, and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. It encrypts a folder’s files and filenames before they reach the cloud, so a leaked cloud account does not hand over readable family data. Set it up once, then treat the encrypted vault as your normal backup folder.

Test the restore once.

A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. Once your three copies exist, deliberately open the external drive’s copy, or download one file from the cloud copy, and check it opens correctly. Do this once, note the date, and you can trust the setup without repeating the test every week.

Paper still counts.

Print the written research note for the person you researched, and give a copy to a relative. Paper does not require a working computer, a subscription or a password to read in twenty years. It will not replace your digital backups. It is, though, the cheapest and most durable copy of the part of your research that matters to your family right now.

Sources.