Please provide tools needed to back up individual lines in FamilySearch Family tree

LegacyUser

George Riley Jennings Jr. said: Please please please give other developers the tools needed to back up individual lines in FamilySearch Family tree. Including Sources, memories and reason statements. In one single operation. Yes you could limit it to some maximum number like 4 generations, or 10 or whatever at a time. People need this. And really best business practices are that we should be able to get OUR (we put it in and it applies to our ancestors) genealogical information out of FamilySearch Family Tree whole and intact. Please. Using Ancestry is a good start - but omits memories and reason statements and sources are done in a separate step.

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Robert Wren said: Try RootsMagic, AncestralQuest at al, they do exactly that. If you happen to be LDS a free Ancestry account will do similar actions.

And a "backup is an excellent idea for the 'open edit' FSTree.

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Jeff Wiseman said: When compared with AQ (the only certified tool I use), Ancestry.com is a weak substitute IMHO. There are just sooo many things that you can use the other tools for that you cannot even attempt in FS (including all those mentioned in the original post). Anyone serious about the research work they are doing and contributing to the FSFT really owes it to themselves (and their piece of mind) to look into using one of the FREE tools that are available to them. And this, even if it is ONLY for the single purpose of backing up work they've done.

Although it does interfere with the personal desires of many contributors, the FS FamilyTree's single, collaborative, shared concept is important to the success in the goals it was designed to meet relative to church theology. That "sharing" feature is here to stay. But adding the ability for each of the millions of patrons that use the site to have even a "limited" backup of chunks of the FSFT would increase the physical size of the FamilyTree database manyfold and would seem to me to be quite unreasonable from an engineering view. That's why sites that provide your own personal workspaces require you to also pay for those resources.

Yea, it would really be nice, but I just can't see it happening. And if it did happen, the functionality of providing for doing "Restores" back into the shared tree are very complicated

P.S. Also you are never going to get any kind of backup of Reason statements because they are actually stored as parts of the individual changes that have been made. You would need to be able to backup the entire Change logs for everything that you've worked on as well. Although tools like AQ do allow you to view those statements as they are saved in the FSFT, you can't download them. If you want your reason statements to be transferrable to other places or sites as backups, you will need to store them as notes--the way FS should have done it in the first place. But Reason statements are a whole different problem (there are other discussions on this forum covering those problems, so do a search)

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Adrian Bruce said: I don't sync my PC based tree with FamilyTree but I know that plenty of people do. I would advise you to try the free versions of the software that Robert mentions because I believe that some, at least, will do the sync from the free version.

What you need to check, however, is how the software syncs things like Memories and Discussions. If it does. The sort of PC based software that we're talking about is usually based around the GEDCOM model so anything matching that, shouldn't be a problem, although even there, you can do stuff in those programs that FS FamilyTree can't - such as cite Sources against non Vital Events. If you think of FSFT as your master, that probably won't matter.

The issue will come with things like Memories and Discussions, which are "proprietary" to FamilySearch, so if you make extensive use of those, you may need to think a bit, if you find that they don't go down to your PC.

As I said, I can't speak from experience but these are the things that I believe that you need to think about.

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Robert Wren said: I hate to disagree with Jeff, because I probably don't . . . BUT I personally prefer Ancestry as my primary 'back-up' as I think they have a far better search capability than Family Search and it is quite easy to transfer between the two sites. In fact, Ancestry "search" nearly duplicated my decades of research in mere months with 'leaf' analysis.

I also use MyHeritage - as a research site - but I'm not enamored with the MyH-FS autosync feature. ( I expect to see a Jeff response to my recent post to that subject.)

I have used both Ancestral Quest & RootsMagic in connection with FS, but I don't find them that easy to coordinate with both (or either) FS and/or Ancestry.

To each their own - but BACK-UP somewhere. FS is too volatile for me and requires too much 'tending.' IMO, COMPLETE open editing is not compatible with accuracy!!!!! (review the formative White Paper for FS http://broadcast.lds.org/eLearning/fh...

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Jeff Wiseman said: Like the current "reason" statements, "discussions" are another proprietary to FS implementation. Neither are in the GEDCOM standard. In fact, I'm not sure that they are in the GEDCOM-X standard either.

Discussions are Notes with private ownership added. They are nothing more than that. FS implemented them instead of expanding on the messages facility which is far more useful. Reasons are schizophrenic in that a Note based concept and a change History concept have been munged together.

If the proper Notes based implementation had been used for those items, both of those types of information would easily sync to any PC or other website. They could also be transported via GEDCOM as well.

I totally avoid all of those problems by putting important discussions and reasons for the derivation of conclusions into Notes. Unfortunately the setup in the UI for FS makes this awkward at times.

BTW, Ancestral Quest does have a memories type feature (i.e., scrapbook) that memories items in FS can be synced down too. Most other genealogical systems do to. After all, most of those systems want you to be able to save all of those "old pictures". Whether or not they can be sync'ed with FS is system dependent, as you already pointed out.

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Tom Huber said: A backup implies a complete copy. None of the programs mentioned provide that feature, although the three certified programs come the closest to doing it. Ancestry has additional features because it is tied to their records and provides valuable hints.

I use Ancestral Quest for more than just a backup -- I use it to track my living relatives, add images of documentation, especially those that are not online, and family photographs. I have also set up my sources as source-centric sources, rather than the person-centric sources used by FamilySearch FamilyTree.

The photo memories feature in FamilySearch is actually better than any others that I have explored, because each person in a historical photograph can be tagged to their record in the massive tree.

So is there a complete backup package?

My answer is no, there isn't.

GEDCOM leaves a lot to be desired because it hasn't been kept up to date, even if you have GEDCOMx available, even if it was available to download your ancestral lines from FamilySearch FamilyTree in a transferable format/

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Robert Wren said: BTW, Rootsmagic required a SEPARATE download from Ancestry, and doesn't seem to be able to compare the FS with Ancestry downloaded files. So I have two file in RM, (maybe more)

I'm not sure what Ancestral Quest does on that issue.

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Jeff Wiseman said: I agree completely Robert. My comments re: Ancestry.com was limited specifically to doing BACKUPS. I have an Ancestry account as well, and like you indicated, I can frequently find things there that I can't find on FS (including some FS historical records!).

I also like to be able to control my own backups. They don't exist on a site that someone else owns. And if you want to produce any variety of printouts, I'm not sure that Ancestry is much better than FS. AQ (as I suspect some of the other PC based programs are) is better for all kinds of variations. Adding extra flags to track things that FS has no status on as well as research notes that only compete with the terribly weak FS To-Do list are all things that you benefit from with the PC programs.

Ancestry has some really nice features that are good to access occasionally. Also, they have the formal DNA support that many people use. But if you use the site a lot, then the convenience of it for backups is obviously increased. So Preferences obviously can depend on your workflows.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Re: the Ancestry downloads in AQ, I have not done it. But I believe that it is just another sync type mechanism. I do know that AQ has the ability to run compares on different AQ databases, and you can have multiple AQ databases open at the same time on the screen. But it's been a long while since I tried anything like that.

I don't have any workflows that would need that. the FSFT is my goto work area. I go there and refine records to a point that I can leave them. Then I sync them to my AQ database. If I have issues trying to find information on those records, I'll look a Ancestry. But I put it all into FS first and push it out from there.

I know that Tom Huber uses a different approach. I believe that he uses AQ as his primary source and copy from there up to FS.

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Jeff Wiseman said:

A backup implies a complete copy

I see what you are saying. Really, I use AQ to support a collection of backups of each person record with their relationships and supporting documents (e.g., sources, Notes, pictures, etc.). They are snapshots in time for each person record. And the trick is to make the snapshot every time you have worked on the record and consider it "satisfactorily up to date" per your own opinion at that point in time. That way "your work" has been saved.

If you put a watch on that record and something changes, it means something has changed from what you considered "satisfactory". You examine the change, and if it seems "satisfactory" (i.e., another source was added), then you just do another sync at that point. If it is not satisfactory, you make the suitable changes and then sync it again.

Re: GEDCOM, the GEDCOM standard didn't provide much support for formalized sources which is one of the reasons that GEDCOM imports to the FSFT don't have a lot in the line of sources maintained.