Are you regularly backing up your Reunion family files? Making a backup is important for more than protecting your precious research in the event of hard drive failures and catastrophes. Be sure to make a copy of your family file before making significant changes to your family file. Reunion for Mac’s creator, Leister Productions, even recommends making a backup before you make any changes. Whether you’re that cautious or not, you’ll eventually want to make a backup. There are basically two ways to make a backup copy of a family file.
Copying a Family File Within Reunion
Reunion has a feature on the “File” menu, “Save a Copy…” that will create an exact copy of the currently open family file. It will also create compact and clone copies. I recommend sticking with the exact copy in the type drop-down.
Reunion will suggest the same file name with the word “copy” appended. You can change it. I suggest replacing the word “copy” with the current date in year, month, day order.
Like all the other file save dialogs on the Mac, you can change the location of the duplicate file.
No matter what you call the copy or where you save it, this video will show you how:
Backing Up A Family File in the Finder
You can also backup a Reunion family file just as you would with any other file on your Mac, using the Finder. By default your family files are in the folder, “Reunion Files” in the “Documents” folder in your home folder. As with dragging and dropping any file to create a copy, be sure to hold down the option key while dragging so a copy is created. If you don’t, you’ll end up moving your file.
Think about keeping a copy on a different hard drive or even better, in a completely different location. My off-site backups go on a “cloud” service. As I covered in a previous video, Dropbox is a great way to keep a backup of genealogy files offsite.
Regardless of where you put the copy, this video will show you how to use the finder to create a backup copy of a Reunion family file:
You can even use this method to store the family file on CD or DVD using this previous article on backing up genealogy files to CD or DVD.
I’m relying on Time Machine to maintain copies of my Reunion file. Since that’s dependent on the health of the hard drive, I also use and application called Arq (see in MacUpdate.com) which I’ve set up to do an hourly save of my User Folder, offsite, to the ‘cloud’ at Amazon.com Web Services (AWS). It acts a lot like Time Machine and provides an extra measure of protection.
I have Reunion 13, but cannot access it for some reason.