If you value your research it is important to ensure you have backups of everything. Hard drives can crash taking valuable information into the ether and never to return. And if you are extremely unlucky that old copy of software you were using to store your family tree may well go with it. It may sound extreme, but this happened to my mom recently - and she is still re-inputting the information she had gathered on the family back onto the new computer.

You know it doesn't matter how many times you can tell people to make backups because they're important - the issue doesn't become an issue until it affects you directly. So whilst I could say - you know "I told you so" I refrained from doing so, but have downloaded a new copy of Corral for her so she can save the information into one of the most stable sources around - the Internet (World Wide Web) or as we call it "cloud computing".

Don't lose your hard earned information...get some backups and stay safe.

The bell tolls for your magnetic media | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com

January 4th, 2009
Posted by Jason Perlow

Don’t wait to try to retrieve the data and content from your magnetic media. Chances are, some of it may already be unrecoverable and highly degraded. Act now.

If you’ve got any kind of magnetic media, and you give a crap about anything that’s stored on them, I urge you to transition them off to a more stable digital storage medium immediately. We’re now at the cusp of which virtually any data from the 1990’s stored on floppy might be unusable, depending on the conditions in which they were kept. If you’ve got 5.25 inch floppies, you might even be completely out of luck, since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find systems that can read them or haven’t lost their drive calibration to the point where doing a file dump is next to impossible. Many of the newer systems aren’t even capable of being cabled to a new floppy drive, but you can still buy USB-based units.

Magnetic storage degradation isn’t unique to floppy disks, either. Tapes have a limited life span as do CD-ROM's, and we will probably start to see DVD's begin to degrade as well.

Keep copies of everything and migrate your digital files to newer media and mediums every few years. This ensures you can still access your family history research. In record keeping terms it is a good idea to make a note of the original sources of where you found the information - should the unthinkable happen and you have to recreate your family history from scratch.