Online Backups

I have a lot of information and pictures stored on my laptop computer. I would be lost and devastated if I lost everything on my hard drive. More so now than ever before since I don't even have prints of the last few years of my pictures, just files on my computer. So I have a MacBook which does backups all the time. This is great! If something happened to my hard drive, all would not be lost and I could restore from my backup. But what if something happened to my house and I lost my computer and my backup? This is what has been bugging me for a while.

I listen to the Genealogy Guys podcast and they have mentioned several time that they do online backups with Mozy. So I decided I would give this service a try and signed up for a two year time frame. Mozy would backup my computer when I scheduled it and all would be good. I knew it wouldn't be a fast upload, I do have a lot of information, but I believed it would be a good backup.

But I have been having problems with the backup process. It actually takes DAYS and DAYS for a backup. The first time I ended up stopping the backup because I thought it was stuck. I started it again a few days later and it just kept on going and going. This time I was patient and waited it out, checking periodically on the status. Finally it reached 100% and I thought, "Oh Good! It's almost done!" But no, it kept right on going. It was almost up to 120% when I finally stopped it because I totally do not understand why that happened!

So I ask myself, what can I do to speed up the process? Well, the "easy" answer is to clean up my hard drive. I am not always smart about what file type I saved. I do have a lot of .tiff items. So I have been working on changing those over to .jpg which takes up less space. At least, I have been doing this for everything but my pictures. I still really want those at .tiff but maybe I need to store those on a separate hard drive and just have jpg copies on my computer. Ultimately, this is what I want to do but what a huge project!!!

Reading related to Genealogy

Sometimes I come across (or hear about) a book that relates to genealogy. The book I am reading right now qualifies. I want the author, Ingrid Hill, to write stories about my ancestors and I don't care if it is all fiction! The book is Ursula, Under. The reason I am reading this book is because the main piece of the story is set in Michigan, where I live. My library, KDL, does a winter reading program for adults and this is the last book I needed to read to complete the entire bingo page. So I really didn't know a lot about this book before I picked it up. It is actually kind of hard for me to describe but I will try.

The story centers around a little girl named Ursula who falls down a mine shaft. The story then goes back and forward through time exploring this girls ancestry. These stories are so vivid that I felt that I could go to the location described in the book and actually find the grave (or skull) of the person who has since passed from history. I haven't finished the book yet (I'm about 2/3 of the way through) and there is very little information about Ursula's current condition. But I am really enjoying the book! Read it! :)

Organization Update

So I have been working hard(ish) on my files! I have one drawer emptied out, not the smallish drawers either, a very long filing cabinet. What I ended up doing was scanning the obituaries and miscellaneous stuff and filing them by family group.

But I put the internet stuff into folders by site. I already did the Holland Sentinel archives lookups and now I am starting on the GenLias. I have a LOT of dutch ancestors (and their families) so this file is kind of full. (The largest file is actually from a site called Digital Resources of the Netherlands but now I am wondering if I can just use GenLias instead.) Right now I am questioning the dates that are listed since they are labeled Registered. I wonder if the date is actually the event date or the day the event was recorded. Since I haven't been able to find the answer, I am plowing forward with inputting this information into my Bento file and linking to each person.

I do consider the information a primary source since it was recorded at the time of the event. Although I am bothered that the information I am looking at isn't a scanned image but transcribed which does leave room for error. Since I will probably never be able to actually see the documents, I will just have to work with what I have available!