Oh, yes, I’m backed up. But it doesn’t help: here’s the details.
1) I knew we were creaking. I wrote to the software people to ask what the max file size was. They were supposed to answer by 2 days ago. They didn’t. I can now answer the question. At about 45,000 people at 115,000k with 2 gig memory.
2) Realizing I was treading on thin ice, I decided to split the thing, give Jane hers, and me mine, which I reasoned should cut it in half and solve any possible problem. I did that. The program refused to split. Instead of erasing the spare people, it retained them in the list of persons in data-file, while wiping the tree involving them.
3) That—is why the backup does me no good. It will not split.
4) How did it manifest? It quietly scrambled my data and Jane’s into ancestors we don’t even share. How prevalent? Well, it would take analyzing 400 pages of printout to find out.
5. How can I fix this? At least I have the data. I have now to re-enter the whole thing. It’s a hobby. Hobbies are pass-times, eh? They’re supposed to be relaxing, so I refuse to get uptight. I can’t help but shudder remembering what it’s like when you hit the Merovingians and the Vikings all over again…but hey, there’s at least a positive. I’m picking up a few lines that weren’t available when I did this the first time. Not my missing grandmother, but a lot, all the same; and I’ve done some major work since finding some records with my mom’s stuff. Sort of therapeutic, building on what she left. I didn’t, however, want to re-enter the whole tree…
Looks like that’s my only choice. I’ll do it this time as 2 separate trees, since I now know how crowded it can get…sigh.
Aaaargh!!!
Which is why I back it up locally and off site and split everything up a couple of years back. And the split I did manually.
What software are you using? I’ve got all sorts of verions of different software from PAF to FTM2010 through TMG vsn about 2007 and HeritageQuest. I try them all out and none seem great. I decided to keep with FTM because of the tight links with Ancestry and I have the working trees out there as well although I have them marked private for now.
I’m using RootsMagic. No problems with 3.x; 4.x is slower in some ways (but not backing up!) and its ‘source wizard’ is very different, enough that I’m not too crazy
about it (although the refernces come out in a way that the professionals like).
I have 23,000-plus people in my primary file; I have some imported files that run 100,000 and up, and although they run slower, they do run.
Backup, backup, and also export the file to GEDCOM – it’s useful for that.
Can you erase individuals at all? If you can, you can make two copies and erase Jane’s stuff in yours, and yours in Jane’s.
If you can export and import, you may be able to export the DB, edit it, and import it.
If you can bring up two DBs at once, you may be able to (slowly) copy the old DB to a new DB, escaping typing at lease–though you’re such a fast typist, this might be slower.
Oh, I can use the backup for reference, and I have a lot of printout.
I’m using Family Tree Maker, btw. And I could go back to an earlier state: I have all those files backed up. So I won’t lose anything critical. Mostly I just have to remember when to start a new tree rather than let it creak and protest its way into meltdown.
My fix is just to recreate it and relay on the automatic prompts to re-weave it, but it’s going to take a few months. And I’d wanted to use the full tree as a Christmas gift in the family, but that’s not happening, eh? At least it will be lean and clean.
Are you sure it wouldn’t be easier just to trace a tree down to the end and then start getting rid of individuals? I had to do that and it’s a royal pain but still better than typing everything in again. My biggest problem is keeping the citations and sources up to date.
I tried that. They vanish from the tree. But it will not dump them from the list that appears at the left sidebar. That, apparently, is so screwed it can’t figure how to dump them. It just helpfully informs me there’s no apparent relationship.
I can also call up the pre-screwup db and ask it to print out, so I can move a whole lot faster than when I was first entering this stuff. Also I’m cleaning up the place names, which are a gosh-awful mess.
Really? I delete them from the left sidebar and they then go away, never to be seen again. I’m using the latest release, 2010. Just got it last week. Previous users are supposed to get an email with a discount offer but I didn’t get the email and when I found out about it I hollered and got them to extend the offer.
I think they’re a little late for me. Arrgh.
Before he died, my brother Pete was working on our family tree, along with a cousin in Columbus, OH. I wish I knew which tribe my great-grandmother (maternal side) had belonged to, whether it was Osage, Sac, or one of the other Eastern Plains tribes. Not that it makes much difference, but then, it’s personal. Unfortunately, Pete only got as far as her generation, but it doesn’t say anything about her tribe.
I wouldn’t even know where to start, especially since my family didn’t originate here in my home county, although my parents did grow up here. I guess I’ll never really be sure that I’m NOT related to Gaius Julius Caesar, even though we share the same birthday…..
I hope you can get it sorted out soon.
A 2GB database limit when 2TB disks are common. (Shakes head.)
OMG. How horrid and frustrating! Been wanting to get into mine, but just haven’t had the time. And what little I’ve managed to check shows some astounding holes — I think a lot of family hid in the woods to avoid the refenuers [or the military for the native contingent]. At least you have the names, but oh what a mess! Total sympathy — sounds like you deserve some nice single malt.
I feel for CJ, I really do. I’ve just scrapped the source & citation system I’ve been using in the interests of total transparency for whoever gets this mess. And now I have to do them over to conform to the current standards in Elizabeth Shown Mills book “Evidence Explained”. She makes it all so easy; if only my family were in the US.
Yes, I’m slowly working back through my tree making the sources and citation conform to Elizabeth Shown Mills standards. Slow work but (I think) worth it. Out of interest, what makes you wish your family were in the US — mine are all England- and Wales-based but I don’t find it makes a difference.
I use Heredis, but I also use Gededitcom II and have written my own. See if you can export your database to a GEDCOM file. If you can do that, you can import it into almost any genealogy programme.
Arkessian: Then I could plagiarise the examples in her book without agonising over it. The English folks aren’t as much of a problem; it’s the folks Down Under that make it a little more difficult.
Ah. Now I understand. I have a few Australian nth-cousins; and ditto a few Americans. However my problems mostly lie in Wales (Tom Jones son of Ton Jones son of Tom Jones… well you get the picture). It’s a question of tracking them down at all, not documenting them once I have tracked them down!
Have you tried exporting? That was my first thought: export it into something which may be less user-friendly but which is a bit more powerful. That way you can do the mass deletes in there & bring it back into your preferred editor, all cleaned up.
I feel your pain. In 2004, IIRC, I had just purchased my laptop that spring. At our summer family reunion, I cornered everybody and got quite a bit of info, mostly on living people, but a bit on ancestors, too. I offered to burn cds for anybody – no takers. I did save my maternal line to pdfs. Yay! Because, of course, I neglected to back up or burn a copy for myself, and didn’t even save my paternal line’s info to pdfs. So, of course, before I got around to doing anything with it all, I had a small meltdown and lost all that info. I have since retyped all that I had, but I still haven’t admitted to any of my Dad’s family that I lost theirs!
On the upside, I practically forced my cousin to download her pictures to my computer as a backup, and sure enough, she needed them last summer!
Finally heard from the software people: everything should be just fine at this length. Wrong!
As I informed them…
That’s awful. Sympathies for your efforts.
As noted earlier, export into a GEDCOM file. That’s a text file, so you can edit it, and almost every genealogy programme can read it. Survey the available genealogy programmes and purchase (or download free) something that allows you to load and work with the database.
My current database has 73000+ individuals.
THanks for that info, herwin. I’m going to use that. Most of the nastily complicated stuff is in England, France, Holland and Norway. My re-entry has pretty quickly crossed the pond, but improved itself a lot: I’ve found some new stuff in my mother’s photo files; so this is a useful re-do, but once I get it redone, and at several points along the way, I’m going to gedcom-ize it so we don’t go through this again!
OMG!!!! what a royal PITA! for a free d/l my dad uses the lds sw available from their site, familyorigins.org i think it is. i am going to work with him on thurs with the family stuff and will see if that does gedcom files since i’m now on ancestry.com – still undecided about the usefullness of it with my family tree particulars.
PAF is the free software from LDS. I started with it but have moved on. PAF is fairly simple but doesn’t handle sources and citations at all well. The FamilySearch folks have no plans to update it.
Ouch, I feel your pain. I did much the same thing on the Mac side with Reunion when I accidentally deleted the wrong set of people when purging my DB. But the nice folks at Leicester were able to salvage a lot of it. Still took quite a bit of work to fix it back up, though. I’d echo the earlier comment about trying to export it to a gedcom and reimport it into your main program or another one entirely. I think that there are a couple of good freeware gedcom manipulation programs that are Windows only, unfortunately for me, that also might be able to help.
If you’re having problems with the British Isles parts I can email whatever parts of my DB that you’re struggling with as gedcoms since we share a lot of that ancestry. I’ve intermittently cleaned up parts of it based on posts from soc.genealogy.medieval and Foundations, but I certainly won’t promise that it doesn’t need more work.
Jason
FWIW: I’ve got Worldwide subscriptions to ancestry.com, ancestry.com.au, ancestry.co.uk, ancestry.ca etc as well as http://www.findmypast.com and http://www.worldvitalrecords.com. If anyone needs a lookup let me know. Rosemary