This week I had the uncool news that I needed to tell my friend that her only USB stick bearing all of her university experience and 7 years of family photos will cost her $90-500 CAD to recover since she had it nowhere else- breaking our collective hearts.
To this conversation to prevent the tears again:
- do you go cloud?
- online application integrations through social connections like family search.org or ancestry.com or myheritage.com?
- multiple offline storages?
- paper hard copy?
- Publish a book and call it?
There are pros and cons to all of the above.
Cloud Pros:
- You can get it anywhere there is the internet available
- It is expandable
- In many cases, you can have it online
- Traditionally it is easy to share or control the administrative or viewing only access
- more than just genealogy can be shared
Cloud Cons:
- The internet is needed to update the files between sites
- more often than not there is a tangible reoccurring cost
- security issues keep hitting the media
- there is a minimum technical comfort level needed.
Examples DropBox, Google Drive, Sync
Online Socialized Integrations Pros:
- Live updating between like-minded people-
- gaurenteed protection from losses
- super easy to share
- data is 24/7 and not locked to hardware
- universalization and duplicate data controlled (only one specific person talked about not 30 of the same person)
Online Socialized Integrations Cons.
- Errors are across everyone’s data
- may be a cost
- only having specific file types or data
- data integration into the application you are using maybe no longer supported or forcibly transferred to another support application or company
- data harvesting to the profit of the company hosting (hints and clues are sold without your profit)
.Multiple off-line storage (eg 2+ duplicate USB sticks)
Pro
- FULL control, share only when you want when you want
- computers fail- your data is safe
- security issues don’t exist
- cost is one and done. No re-occurring
Digging into the Past 