Preserving Important Things

An Introduction to Preservation

When we are doing family history research or documenting our own lives, we will end up with a lot of important things that need to be protected and preserved somehow so that they can last for a long time. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind as you come up with your own plan for how to preserve important things:

• Your plan should be practical; something that you can keep up with. A good preservation plan that you can realistically keep up with is better than a perfect preservation plan that you can't. "Do not run faster or labor more than you have strength" (from D&C 10:4).

• There is always risk of something being lost; we have to make choices about what are reasonable risks in our situation.

• It is worthwhile to take more efforts in preserving more important things. You must make your own decisions about efforts that are in proportion to the importance of the thing you want to save, and how difficult it would be to redo work or replace something if it is lost. If something very important cannot be replaced if it is lost, it will need a lot of care to preserve it. On the other hand, if losing something will only mean a few hours of work that is easy to redo, it will be frustrating to lose, but you won't need to take as many steps to keep it safe.

• If there is only one copy of something, it will be much easier to lose forever than if there are two or three copies of it. Also, if all the copies are stored in the same place, they are more likely to all be destroyed (such as by a fire or a computer failure) than if there is at least one copy stored somewhere else.

• Not everything needs to be intentionally preserved. If you make careful choices about what is important enough to save, you will have a manageable amount to work with in your preservation plan.

Preserving Physical Photos and Documents

Photographs and documents aren't the only things that need physical preservation and/or digitization. If you have something else that you need to preserve, you may need to search for information specific to that type of item. In this section, I will give resources that are specific to preserving photos or documents:

• FamilySearch Blog - Photo Preservation for Family History: This blog post gives a basic overview about how to handle and store old photographs.

• FamilySearch Blog - Family History Preservation: Preserving Your Family’s Letters and Documents: This gives a good overview of caring for and storing old documents, as well as using copies of the documents while storing originals. (It has some broken links.)

• The Family Curator - How to Save Family History in a Family Archive: If you want more in-depth information on preserving old documents and photographs, this post is a great resource. It gives some guidelines on how to store, organize, and handle old documents and photos, and links to other posts that give more information. If the guidelines shared in this post are unachievable in your situation, don't worry; you don't need to achieve perfection. As the author states in another post (The Family Curator - Are You Curator, Creator or Caretaker of the Family Archive?), anything that we do towards preservation is a benefit. We can do what we are able to do, and things will last longer because of that. Any progress we make is good. :)

Digitizing

We can scan documents and photos to digitize them. For things like heirlooms, taking photos of them and recording the stories behind them will mean that you can still keep the important memories behind the items if anything ever happens to them. This can also help you if you need to get rid of physical objects, or if you want to share the stories behind the object with those in your family who do not own (or may not have the space for) the heirlooms. With very important things, you will probably want to keep the physical object as well as the digital version if you can. You don't necessarily need to keep the physical copy of everything you digitize, but don't rush yourself in making decisions about what to get rid of, because you may not be able to get it back.

Here is an example of one person's approach to scanning photos and documents to preserve them: Jest Kept Secret - How I Digitized, Organized, and Backed Up Thousands of Family Photos and Videos. She also gives information on digitizing things like VHS tapes.

Making Backups

Items that you have digitized (such as scanned photographs), and items that have always been digital (such as photographs you took with your phone) need to be backed up so that they won't be lost. Backups involve making copies that are stored in different places, so that if one copy is lost, the document will still exist somewhere else. There are many ways to approach backups; here are just a few resources that can help you learn about making backups and developing your own backup plan:

• Genealogy Made Easier - Perform Regular Computer Backups In Your Genealogy Research: This website has several pages on making a plan for backups. It talks about a lot of the decisions that need to be made about choosing a backup approach, focusing on what to backup, when to backup, where to store the backups, how to do a backup, and how long to keep copies.

• FamilySearch Blog - Saving Your Family History Securely in the Cloud: This blog post discusses cloud storage as a backup option for genealogists. It discusses pros and cons for using cloud storage for backups. This was from 2014, so not all of the links in the blog post work now. Cloud storage is a very practical option for many people.

• The Armchair Genealogist- 5 Myths about Storing Your Genealogy on the Cloud: This article goes over some myths that may keep people from considering cloud storage as part of their backup strategy, and gives more information about what cloud storage is in the first place. The article gives some good information that can help you decide whether or not cloud storage is a good option for you.

• Family Tree - How to back up your family history research: This article talks about cloud storage and external hard drives as options for a backup plan. It is a good introduction to the process of choosing where to store the things you back up.