Legacy LVUG Community

Tuesday's Tip - Today is the last day of February - where did the month go? Here is a quick tip that many of us forget to take the time to do. It is time to backup our Legacy files (whether you do it on the last day of the month or first day of the month - the key is to DO IT!). No matter if you back up regularly when you work in your Legacy files, I think it is a good idea to backup each month. Then every six months go ahead and delete backups you no longer need. You never know when something will happen - either a hard drive crash, a cloud glitch, or a jump drive lost. Backup to 2 different places (I use the cloud and an external hard drive). Let's be safe rather than sorry.

I'm not sure where to post this question so here goes.  I go in and clean up my backup files periodically because I backup every time I close Legacy.  So, I accumulate a lot of backups.  Those are zipped files.  I realized that I had not done that to my recently added external hard drive.  I took a look at the backup files on the external drive this morning.  I have the regular zipped files that are on my PC.  But, I also have files with extensions: SC, TC, Rc3, PPL, and RGD.  When I open one of the zipped files, I can see those same file extensions.  So, I am assuming that my external hard drive is saving the zipped file but also saving the individual files.  My question is can I confidently delete those individual files as long as I save the zipped (compressed) files?  I have been saving one zipped file for each month just for safety's sake.  I hope I posted this to the write group.

Another question from a Legacy User Newbie: How many tree and media backups do you general keep? Sort of a 'Best Practices' issue. My inclination is to only keep the most recent last two and delete earlier ones but there might be an issue I'm not aware of.

Another back up your work lesson: I do back up every time I close my program, but I will leave it open for days and just close my laptop cover (have a separate monitor) Last week I decided to merge two file together, and did not back up at that moment, then decided that was dumb as I had cleaned up my master tree, so I stopped the merge and deleted the old file.  The next day I started working and noticed that I had double marriages for EVERYONE, and my tree had more than 40,000 people!  I did contact Legacy when I finally figured out what I had done and had to restore my file from Dec 18th!  I had even broken through a brick wall!  So now I am in my second day of trying to get back all the info that I lost.  I did make PDF files of the two families that I had worked on, and hoping that is all that I messed up.   Now, I am backing up as soon as I finish adding new info.  I have a flash drive attached and back up to that each time! Lesso...