Really angry now... Family Tree Builder

[IainBell]

Hi all!
Can anyone help, I wonder?
Yesterday, family tree builder popped up. I rarely look at it. Offered to sync with my family tree on heritage-com. Fair enough, I thought, why not.
Today, 400 relatives are missing! It appears to have synced the lower number of people from family tree builder into my website.
Anyone any ideas as to how I get them back, other than do all then work again?
My latest backup was about 10 days ago (why is it only once a month?) and won't have most of them...
I'll be getting rid of family tree builder, if that's how it works!
Iain

[Cockneyrebel]

Do you have a family tree program? If so you can download a gedcom from it and upload a new tree that way to My Heritage or heritage.com.
Always advisable to keep your tree on a proper program and back it up on a portable hard disk.
Cr

[Rena]

I had a similar experience several years ago and sent a terse email to myheritage. All I got was a sort of apology but no help in resolving the fact that their then new sinc programme had resulted in broken links, loss of notes and the addition of a portion of somebody else's tree on one of my branches.

I'd actually only became a member of Myheritage because they'd taken over the website "gencircles" where I originally kept my tree and then closed it down - stupid me thought I'd find my hard work had been transferred to MH - no such luck.  (somebody at this point is going to ask me where was my back up - if they do, I think I might be giving my offspring the "silent treatment" again).

[IainBell]

No answer yet from heritage.
Cockneyrebel: I was under the impression that heritage WAS a 'family tree program'. If it's not, what do people recommend?
Rena: Keeping a backup was why I signed up (and paid for) the heritage backup service. I have yet (I hope someone can tell me?) to figure out how to do a backup onto a separate hard disk.
I see from my backup list that I have the latest, from 24th Jan. with 644 people, this is a good deal more than I have after the disastrous 'sync'. I'm not going to import it until I get the (expected) tough luck, mate! message from heritage...
Reading about gedcom files, the impression I got was that they are simply data lists, and info still needs to be entered 'manually'. Am I wrong? I have a gedcom 'ready to download', but it's from 2nd Jan. so pretty small...
Sorry for all the newbie questions, but...I'm a newbie!
Iain

[KGarrad]

Gedcom files are text files, but contain (reasonably) complicated data structures

What you can't transfer is images, photos, multi-media files etc.
No need to re-enter standard data, as that is catered for.

Example:
0 HEAD
1 SOUR PAF
2 NAME Personal Ancestral File
2 VERS 5.0
1 DATE 30 NOV 2000
1 GEDC
2 VERS 5.5
2 FORM LINEAGE-LINKED
1 CHAR ANSEL
1 SUBM @U1@
0 @I1@ INDI
1 NAME John /Smith/
1 SEX M
1 FAMS @F1@
0 @I2@ INDI
1 NAME Elizabeth /Stansfield/
1 SEX F
1 FAMS @F1@
0 @I3@ INDI
1 NAME James /Smith/
1 SEX M
1 FAMC @F1@
0 @F1@ FAM
1 HUSB @I1@
1 WIFE @I2@
1 MARR
1 CHIL @I3@
0 @U1@ SUBM
1 NAME Submitter
0 TRLR

Personally, I use RootsMagic on my home PC, with copies on Ancestry.

[hallmark]

Is there no way to unsync them?

[MonicaL]

Oh Iain, you have been working so hard on this 

I can't contribute to your question but just hope you find a solution and recovery of your data...

Monica

[IainBell]

Hi Monica,
Aye, you've worked hard on it as well!
It's annoying, but I still have maybe 150 more people on the app on my phone. As long as I don't update that, I can scroll through and find people, put them back the hard way...
I've got all the paperwork, spent the credits, so it's just...work!
I might, when I go back to it, get a lot of them back through smart matches, since I've been confirming them as I went along.
Learning...the hard way!
Iain

[Cockneyrebel]

I use Family Historian as it's made in the UK and for which you can get a free downloadable trial before paying a one off payment of about £36 and is upgraded free; it has a very good active forum at FHUG where you can get answers to problems.
Personally I don't trust the online websites to build and look after my trees; I had a tree on Ancestry which was supposed to sync with my then FTM program but as in your case, Iain, it didn't and in fact I lost a lot of my tree as well as having incorrect info being left on the program, took me years to correct it!
Now I keep my tree on my FH program and upload a gedcom to Anc/MH every few months; the other alternative is to use tribalpages where you can upload your gedcom as well as put media/photos on it and keep them there. You can upload new gedcoms but won't lose the media already on that site; you can get a free version or pay to get rid of ads. You can also invite people to it and it has all sorts of reports you can use from it.
Cr