2017 Update: Things change a lot in the seven years since I wrote Tuesday’s Tip: BackUpMyTree.com about this service. Happily, backupmytree.com is now owned by MyHeritage and supports all family tree data files, Mac or Windows. It’s now owned by MyHeritage, and it’s still free.
My only caveat: this service backs-up the data files for your family tree software, but it is not backing up digital scans, records, downloads and other supporting information for your family tree research stored outside your family tree program. So you still need an automated local backup of your whole hard drive.
2010 Post: How great is this? BackUpMyTree.com is a free website that backs up your family tree software data file automatically in the cloud.
Not only will you have your data preserved in the event of hardware failure or disaster, but you can also access your tree from anywhere using their cloud computing capability. Your data is safe via SSL encryption. And you can even store successive versions of your tree. (Those of you who have attended my organizing presentation know I start with a fresh family tree file every day I do substantive research.) This service has been live for about six weeks.
2017 features for Backupmytree.com:
How does the service work?
You install the BackupMyTree software and it automatically detects all your family tree files, and begins uploading them to our servers for backup. The upload occurs in the background, automatically, so you can truly forget about backing up your tree. If you want to exclude a file, you can do that at any time. However, by default and for your protection, BackupMyTree automatically backs up all new and existing tree files unless you specify a tree to be excluded.
What makes BackupMyTree better than other backup methods?
We’ve built BackupMyTree to be the gold-standard in family tree backup. Because it’s focused just on family trees, it has a few significant advantages over other methods:
- Up to 25 previous versions that do not time-out. Many online backup services only keep previous versions for 30 days — we have no limit for how long we keep your previous versions. This is a critical difference since you may not realize you’ve corrupted your tree for days or weeks and that previous version is critical to get back.
- We keep deleted files beyond 30 days (indefinitely at the moment but will always be at least 6 months). Almost every online backup service in existence destroys deleted files after 30 days. If you didn’t realize that one of your less popular family tree files had gone missing, you would hate to find out on the 31st day that the file is missing and now can’t be restored.
- Because BackupMyTree only focuses on your tree files, the backup of your tree is never being held up by the backup of music, photos or other files. Standard online backup services can take days or weeks to catch-up if you add a lot of files, and they will not prioritize your tree files.
Visit https://www.backupmytree.com/features for more information.
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