How to Back Up Your Family Tree So No Platform Can Hold It Hostage
Family trees are lost in quiet ways. A laptop dies. A password is forgotten. A service closes, or an account lapses while life is busy. No one means to lose twenty years of research. It happens because the tree lived in exactly one place, and that place had a bad day.
A backup is the difference between a bad day and a disaster. This guide gives you a plain, complete routine: what to copy, in what forms, to which places, and how often. It assumes no special skill. If you can export a file and copy it to a drive, you can do all of this. The case for why it matters is made in why genealogy data gets locked in. The file at the center of the routine is explained in what is a GEDCOM file.
What a Complete Backup Holds
A family tree is more than one file. Backing up "the tree" and missing the rest is the most common failure in this whole subject. A complete backup holds five things:
| Item | What it is | Why it must be in the backup |
|---|---|---|
| The GEDCOM export | Your tree as an open text file | Rebuilds the tree in any program or service |
| The program's own file | The native file or backup of your software | Restores your exact working setup, fastest |
| The media folder | Photos, scans, documents — the real files | GEDCOM holds links, not images; lose these and the tree keeps empty frames |
| The source scans | Census pages, certificates, letters you saved | The proof behind your facts; some cannot be fetched twice |
| A plain text note | Where things are, what program, what version | Lets future you — or your family — use the backup at all |
Notice what the GEDCOM file does in this list. It is not the whole backup. It is the part that makes the backup portable. The program's own file restores fastest today. The GEDCOM file restores into anything, including programs that do not exist yet. Keep both, every time. They guard against different futures.
The Rule of Three
Backup practice across all fields rests on one plain rule: three copies, two kinds of storage, one copy somewhere else.
Three copies. The working copy on your computer, plus two backups. One copy is not a backup. It is a hope.
Two kinds of storage. For example, your computer's drive and an external drive, or a drive and a cloud store. Two copies on the same drive die together when the drive dies.
One copy somewhere else. A different building, ideally. Fire, flood, and theft take the whole desk at once. A cloud copy counts as somewhere else. So does a drive kept at a relative's house.
You do not need to build this all in one day. Start with one external copy today, add the off-site copy this week, and the rule is met. The routine below assumes the rule's shape; scale the detail to the tree you have.
The Routine, Step by Step
- Export the GEDCOM file. Use your program's or service's export. Whole tree, not one branch. If the tool offers a version choice, export the version your other tools read — and if you keep a desktop program as your second home, an extra export in the other version costs nothing. The version choice is explained in GEDCOM 5.5.1 vs 7.0.
- Save the program's own backup. Every serious program has a backup or save-a-copy command. Use it in the same sitting, so the two files describe the same tree on the same day.
- Copy the media folder as it stands. Do not tidy it first. A backup made today beats a tidy backup planned for next month. If your media lives inside the program's folders, find where the program keeps it and copy that folder whole.
- Name the set with the date. One folder per backup, named like 2026-11-09-family-tree. Inside it: the GEDCOM file, the program backup, the media, and the note. A name with a date never lies about which copy is newest.
- Write the note. Five lines are enough: the date, the program and version that made the files, the person count, where the other copies live, and any password hint your family would need to reach the accounts. Write it like the reader has never seen your system. One day the reader will not have.
- Validate the GEDCOM file. Run it through a checker before you store it. A backup of a broken file is a broken promise. The GedConvert tool on the home page gives the validation report free, with the people and family counts to write into your note. The faults it hunts are listed in why GEDCOM exports fail validation.
- Copy the set to the second storage, then to the off-site copy. Let both finish. Check that the file sizes match before you call it done.
- Open one file from the backup. Pick the GEDCOM file from the external copy and open it — in a text editor, a viewer, anything. A backup you have never opened is a rumor. Thirty seconds proves it is real.
The whole routine takes ten to twenty minutes once it is a habit. The first run takes longer, mostly for finding the media folder and writing the note. Every run after that is export, copy, copy, check.
How Often to Run It
Tie the backup to events, not just to the calendar. Run it after any big research push, before you merge another tree into yours, before you switch programs or services, and before a computer is replaced or repaired. Those are the moments when the tree changes most or the risk spikes highest.
Add a plain calendar rhythm under the event triggers: once a quarter is a fair floor for an active researcher, once a month if you research weekly. Put it on the calendar like any other chore. A routine that waits for you to remember it will wait through exactly the busy season when a loss hurts most.
Keep old backups. Storage is cheap, and an old backup is the only cure for a slow disaster: a bad merge, a wrong family linked in error, a branch deleted by mistake and found out six months later. Keep at least the last four dated sets, plus one set per year that you never delete. The yearly sets are your deep history.
If drive space ever forces a choice, thin the media copies of mid-year sets before you thin the dated GEDCOM files. The text files are tiny and carry the tree's whole structure. A year with every dated export kept, even if some media sets were pruned, still lets you trace exactly when a fact changed and which version of the tree held it.
Where People Go Wrong
Backing up only inside the service. A copy held in the same account as the tree is not a backup. It shares the account's fate: the password, the payment, the terms. Export out means out — onto storage you control.
Backing up the GEDCOM file but not the media. The tree opens, the facts are there, and every photo frame is empty. Cousins do not ask about your source citations. They ask for the photos. Guard them the same way.
One backup, made once, long ago. A backup from three years ago holds a tree three years younger. It is far better than nothing and far short of safe. The dated-folder habit solves this without thought: new folder, same steps.
Never testing the restore. The day you need the backup is the wrong day to learn the drive is unreadable or the file is cut short. The thirty-second open test, plus one true test import a year into a spare program, closes this hole.
Trusting a file with faults. An export can carry broken links or encoding slips that the source program never showed. Storing it unchecked stores the faults. Validation takes a minute. The repair path, when you need it, fixes format and leaves facts to you — see the pricing page for how report and repair divide between free and paid plans.
Letting passwords be the backup's lock. If your copies sit behind accounts only you can open, your family cannot reach the tree if something happens to you. The note in each backup set should say, in plain terms, how a named person gets in. Many services and password tools offer a legacy or emergency access path. Set one up while it is easy.
A Word on Living People
A backup holds the whole tree, including living relatives and their dates. That makes each copy a private document. Store copies the way you store other private papers: drives you control, cloud accounts with strong passwords, and no public links. When you share a tree with family, share an export trimmed of living people's details for that purpose. The backup itself stays whole and stays private. Wholeness is its job; sharing is a separate act with its own file.
If the Worst Already Happened
If you are reading this after a loss, work the order of salvage. First, the service account: passwords can be reset, lapsed accounts often hold data for a grace period, and support desks can restore more than their help pages promise. Second, your own machines: old laptops, email attachments where you sent the tree to cousins, downloads folders. Third, your family: anyone you ever sent a file to holds a copy of the tree as it was. Fourth, rebuild from sources. A lost tree with good citations in your notes is a setback. A lost tree with nothing is a restart. Let the salvage teach the routine above, and start it the day the tree stands again — that day does come, and the new tree grows faster than the first one did, because you know where everything is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a GEDCOM export by itself a good enough backup? It is the most portable part, but not the whole. Add the program's own file for a fast restore, and the media folder for the photos and scans. All three together are the backup.
Cloud drive or external drive — which is better? Use both; the rule of three asks for two kinds of storage and one copy off-site. A cloud copy is off-site by nature. An external drive is fast and fully yours. Together they cover each other's weak spots.
How big will my backups get? The GEDCOM file is text: even a large tree is a few megabytes. Media is the weight. Photos and scans fill drives. That is a reason to keep media tidy over time, not a reason to skip backing it up.
Should my backup be GEDCOM 7.0 or 5.5.1? Keep the version your main tools read best, and know that a 7.0 copy is UTF-8 by rule, which ages well. Keeping one export of each, in the same dated folder, removes the question entirely. The file sizes make the luxury cheap.
Can I automate the copies? Partly. Backup tools and cloud sync can copy folders on a schedule, and that helps. The export step still needs you, because the fresh GEDCOM must come out of the program or service first. Export by hand, then let the tools carry the copies.
What do I hand my children so the tree survives me? A dated backup set on a drive, the note that explains it, and access arranged while you can arrange it. Tell them where it is. A perfect backup no one knows about is a treasure buried without a map.
References
- https://gedcom.io/ — The home of the GEDCOM standard, the open format at the center of a portable backup.
- https://www.archives.gov/research/genealogy — The U.S. National Archives guide to genealogy research and records.
- https://www.loc.gov/ — The Library of Congress, a major source of census, local history, and family history material.