If you’re not aware of Y2K, you’ve managed to insulate yourself from one of the most publicized and highly anticipated potential disasters in history. For a summary of Y2K in the world of genealogy, see the Nov/Dec 1998 issue of I<>Ancestry, page 55.

Briefly, Y2K is the concern that the internal programming within computer systems will not successfully handle the rollover of the date from the year 1999 to the year 2000. This stems from the year date being stored as a two digit number rather than the full four digit year. Processing may be interrupted when a two digit date of "00" for 2000 appears to the PC to be numerically less than "99" for 1999.

So, in order to be enjoying Robert Burns’ most famous work as rendered by the ghost of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians at midnight on December 31st, it is best to plan ahead. Assuming you’ve taken the steps necessary to assure that your PC is Y2K-compliant, you may still be experiencing a lingering fear that something may still go wrong.

The only absolute assurance you can obtain against problems occurring due to Y2K is to create backups of your important data. Backups are always good practice, but they may be particularly life-saving as Y2K approaches. Now is the time to develop your own backup plan–don’t delay until the end of December.

Backup Early and Often
A backup is simply a duplicate copy of files and/or directories which is kept on a medium other than the hard drive. Backups range from mirror-image copies of hard drives to copies of a few files on a single floppy diskette. Popular and relatively inexpensive backup media include 8 gigabyte DAT magnetic tape cassettes, 100 megabyte Zip disks, 1 gigabyte Jazz disks, and the ever-popular 1.44 megabyte floppy diskettes. Regardless of the medium used, the frequency with which you create your backups is vital. Use these simple questions as a guide to determine how often you need to back up:

1.Will recreating the new data you’ve entered since your last backup take more time than making a backup now? If yes, it’s time to make backup copies.

Personally, I prefer to make backups of my important genealogy files once a week. The advice about voting in old Chicago is pertinent here: backup early and often.

Backups Have Families Too
As a family historian, you are undoubtedly in awe of the march of generations through time. The richness of our time on earth is immeasurably increased when multiple generations of a family spend it together. The knowledge, experiences, and traditions of a family handed down from grandfather to father to son are one of the strengths of the human experience.

This concept of strength in multiple generations is also true of your backup plan. Regardless of what media you use or how frequently you backup, it is very important to retain several generations of backup copies in order to ensure recoverability.

Let’s take a simple weekly backup to a floppy diskette as an example. The diskette from week one can be considered the "grandfather." The next week, don’t overwrite your backup on the same diskette used the week before. Instead make your week two backup on a different diskette and consider it the "father." On week three, backup to yet another new diskette, leaving both the grandfather and father to continue storing weeks one and two. The third diskette thus becomes the "son." By week four it is time to retire the grandfather diskette. Overwrite the week one backup diskette with the week four data. The week two diskette now moves up to the grandfather generation, week three moves to the father position, and your newly-minted week four diskette is now the son generation.

By continuing this rotation pattern, you can save a great deal of grief. Imagine after you’ve taken your week four backup, you have a problem with your PC. Once the problem is resolved and you need to restore from your backup diskette, you would naturally choose the son generation diskette, in this case the week four backup, from which to restore. It is, after all, the most current. However, what if the diskette has some physical flaw not detected when you created your backup? What if your floppy disk drive refuses to read the diskette?

If week four were your only copy of a backup, you’d be in a world of hurt. However, because you treasured the backups prior to week four, you can recover. Granted, you will have to go back to week three’s diskette, the father generation, and you will have lost any new information entered between week three and now. But chances are the majority of your data will be there. See the value of multiple generation backups?

One helpful addition to a generational backup plan is to take a copy of a recent backup offsite, away from your PC and your home. I make two copies of every backup, one copy specifically for offsite storage such as a relative’s house or a safe deposit box. Remember the offsite storage location needs to be a considerable physical distance from your home. This will ensure that a fire in your home, burst pipes, or other localized disasters won’t destroy your PC and the only copy of your backups.

Files, Files, Where Are the Files?
When creating a backup plan, the question always arises: "What files should I back up?" The glib answer is, of course, all of them. This may not be practical, however, due to time constraints or backup media capacity. For genealogists, the critical files to back up will usually be the database files our genealogy software programs use to store the information on our ancestry. Depending on the software program you use, these files will vary in name, location, and size. Below is a partial list of the file name extensions which house the most important files in each of the genealogy software programs named. This is by no means an all-inclusive list. If your software is not listed, or if you have questions regarding what specific files to backup and how, contact the vendor of your software package.

Critical Genealogy Files by Product:

• Ancestral Quest–*.aq (v. 3.0) or *.dat (v. 2.2 or earlier)
• Family Tree Maker–*.ftb
• Generations–*.uds & *.cht
• Legacy–*.ftb
• The Master Genealogist–*.cfg and *.sqz (backup of .dbf and .fpt files)
• Personal Ancestral File–*.paf
• Ultimate Family Tree–*.sqz

Note that most of these programs have their own backup features (usually found on the menu bar under File), and using them is always recommended by the vendors to ensure that all critical files are backed up. Most of these built-ins allow you to point your backup to a specified piece of removable media such as your floppy drive or a Zip drive. Some of the files are actually created by the built-in backup process. Thus if you can’t locate them, make sure you’ve run through the built-in backup process in your software first. Use Explorer, My Computer, or File Manager search features to find the locations of these file name extensions on your PC.

Remember that the genealogy software which incorporates your images, audio, or video clips have types of files often not included in the actual genealogy database. They are usually stored elsewhere on your PC and are linked by the genealogy software. Thus, making backups of your genealogy database may not include the ancestral photographs or family reunion video clips which are accessible via your genealogy software. Be sure to follow your vendor’s advice on the location of these types of external files and back them up as well.

Your Communication with Others
An increasingly important part of genealogy research is being conducted with the aid of the Internet. Both e-mail messages and sites on the Internet can be important resources, and you may not wish to permanently lose access to your e-mail or the whereabouts of your favored Web sites due to computer failure. This means you need to backup the most important parts of your electronic correspondence and your Web browsing.

You will want to back up as much of your e-mail directory as practical. If you don’t wish to save all your e-mail, at a minimum you should regularly backup your address book. The following is a partial list of the file names, file extensions, or directory path names of the address books for popular e-mail programs. This is not an exhaustive list, so consult your e-mail software vendor for your program’s specifics.

E-mail Address Books:

• Eudora–nndbase.txt and nndbase.toc
• Outlook & Outlook Express–*.pab
• AOL–\AOLdirectory\organize\user_name (where user_name is your AOL user name)

Likewise, a PC failure should not deprive you from visiting your favorite research sites. Check with your browser vendor to determine which specific files to backup for your browser software. Here are the file names and directory path names for three of the most popular browsers.

Your Bookmarks of Favorite Web Sites:

• Netscape–bookmark.htm
• Internet Explorer–\windows\favorites\*.*
• AOL–\AOL directory\organize\user_name

An Ounce of Prevention
The above has been only a basic summary of backup principles and techniques. Each individual’s requirements will be unique. Backup plans can be relatively simple or they can involve automatic "hands-off" initiation and the creation of incremental backups interspersed with occasional full backups. Whatever the level of complexity you choose, the important thing to remember is to do your backups.

With some time left before the clocks roll over, now is the time to develop your backup plan, get into the habit of making them, and test them to ensure that you can restore from them. With a solid backup plan in place well before midnight on December 31st, your only worry should be dodging the airborne champagne corks.