Family Tree Maker.

[Althea7]

Has anyone used Family Tree Maker?  How much space does it take up on your computer?  And how simple or otherwise is it to use?  When I once tried a sample of one of these things, can't remember which one, it seemed to take up a lot of storage space on my computer, and also I couldn't work out how to use it, so I deleted it.

What backup do people use against losing their Ancestry family tree?  I have a saved GEDCOM, which I have also emailed to myself.  I saved all my media on my computer.  So if both Ancestry and my computer broke down at the same time, I would have the GEDCOM in my email account that I could resurrect it from, but would just lose all my media.

Having Family Tree Maker on my computer wouldn't help if my computer failed at the same time as Ancestry?

I am trying to work out what other ways there are of backing up my family tree.

[Craclyn]

FTM uses fairly minimal storage space for both the programme and the tree information. Your main consideration in determining how much storage you would use is the source documentation and other media files you may want to attach to the tree.

[Althea7]

I have a lot of sources, mainly censuses and the like. Also gravestones that I have photographed myself and links to gravestones on Find a Grave, family photographs, etc.  I try to back everything up with sources if I can.

Thousands of people, most with sources and media to tell their story.

[Albufera32]

I would suggest saving the Gedcom and your various media, pics etc onto an external hard drive or USB stick (or even both).

[Kiltpin]

Mine is 4.46gigabytes. That is for two trees 900 and 800 persons. They are both graphic heavy. It is not a lot out of a one terrabyte hard drive. It makes its own auto-backups, so whatever its got, it has got it twice.   

Regards 

Chas

[[Ray]]

Hi     

"IT" has got "it" twice?       

However, you've only got "IT/it" once (on the single drive ).       

Get another drive and copy "it" to "that".     

Place "that" in a geographically separate place     
[ Mother's / Son's / Dau's / Sister's / Bro's / etc's . . . . . ]
You can NEVER have enough copies of the electronic data.       

Ray[ Soapbox away ]

[Kiltpin]

Hi     

"IT" has got "it" twice?       

However, you've only got "IT/it" once (on the single drive ).       

Get another drive and copy "it" to "that".     

Place "that" in a geographically separate place     
[ Mother's / Son's / Dau's / Sister's / Bro's / etc's . . . . . ]
You can NEVER have enough copies of the electronic data.       

Ray
 

Thank you for that, Ray, but the question was "Has anyone used Family Tree Maker?  How much space does it take up on your computer?". That is what I answered.   

My two trees are on Ancestry and Family Tree Maker is synced to them both, so in essence they are a back-up for each other - what happens on one is mirrored to the other. 

For myself, I have my own physical Home Cloud, which is set to make automatic back-ups of my hard drive, or parts there of. It is 4 Tb and I could use it that way, but it comes as 2 + 2 by default. That is to say, it makes a back-up of the back-up it just made. It then verifies that the original, the back-up and the back-up/back-up are all identical. Should they not be so (for example, power outage), it will alert me to the fault and attempt to re-back-up.  It is a Western Digital and it does this all by itself, part of its firmware.

I also have a 1 Tb pocket sized hard drive. This is just a "People List". Two folders (one for each tree), in which are 26 alphabetical folders, in which are all the people of that letter. Each person's folder contains - 

 a "Notepad" document with all the facts - BDM plus times, dates and places of other life events. 
a copy of all documents and pictures. As originals and any enhancements that I have made. 
a "Notepad""To Do List" of any further work to be done. 
a "Notepad" narrative of why I came to the conclusions I did. 

So apart from the pocket drive which I back-up once a week, everything else is automatic. 

Regards 

Chas

[[Ray]]

Hi Chas     


Glad to see that I don't have to get my soapbox out ( re you )     


Ray
     

[andrewalston]

Most of the family history programs take up about the same space on a hard drive - not a lot in today's terms. About the same as a typical word processing program. The one I use takes about 300MB including config files and a PDF printer driver.

The big user of space is, or ought to be, your data.

The database associated with my one-name study takes under 60MB. The census images are nearly 2GB. I could back up the whole of the ONS, including pictures of churches and gravestones, to a DVD. There are however a load of files which are "associated", such as images of old maps, so my Genealogy folder takes a lot more than that.

Of course, these would take the same amount of space whichever software I used.

The likes of Ancestry want you to keep ALL your data on their site, because it then becomes THEIR data (it's in the terms and conditions). If you upload a photo of your grandmother, you give them permission to use that for any purpose they like. If another user decides that it is a photo of Marie Antoinette as she sailed with Christopher Columbus on Apollo 11 to discover Egypt, that does not breach their conditions. A lot of us believe that if it is your research, it should be under YOUR control.

So try out several family history programs and see which work in a way you like. Nearly all of them have a "try before you buy" option. Try things out with a part of your tree that you know well, so you can see the effort needed to accomplish things like data entry. How does it deal with censuses? Does it cope with UK addresses and date formats (including things like 28 Jan 1740/1)? Does it make it easy to deal with source references? Does it produce the reports you want?

Whichever software you end up with, BACK UP YOUR RESEARCH !!  Back it up to somewhere that you trust. Back it up to somewhere where you can get it back following a disaster. Make sure that there is more than one copy of your efforts. There's a topic pinned to the top of this board. Read it and ACT!