March Meeting and Genealogy Security

Again, we had a spectacular discussion at the March meeting.  The conversation was so rich and wide-reaching I can only give you a flavor of it here.

A big thank you to Linda L. (otherwise known as Linda Q).  Linda projected her pictures from RootsTech for us, including a few of her family who live in the Salt Lake area and visited her at the conference.   The pictures showed the vastness of the venue and the Expo Hall.  She enjoyed visiting with the variety of vendors in the Expo Hall.  Free videos of general sessions and classes continue to be added to the RootsTech home page.  There are more than 40 videos there now at https://www.rootstech.org/.

Bill R. spoke of “secret” Facebook groups for people with surprising and emotional DNA results.  I think “secret” means that you can’t search to find them.  You have to hear about them some other way.  The Atlantic article linked below identifies the group as DNA NPE group.  As we have said many times, NPE started out as Non-Parental Event.  Now Blaine Bettinger calls this situation MPE, Mis-attributed Parentage Event.  And I also hear NPE, Not the Parent Expected.  Any of these is fine with me.  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/dna-test-misattributed-paternity/562928/

Half the group had attended Cyndi Ingles’ technical seminar the previous Saturday.  She gave us a lot of food for thought as many thought they needed to improve their security, backups and online organization. 

Cyndi and lots of other bloggers emphasize some of the same points so none of this is proprietary to Cyndi. 

1.     Regular backups on different media and offsite are so important.  Consider what you already have in the cloud like family trees, DNA data, email, banking info, etc.  Backups are copies that you write over and archive copies are a snapshot that you never write over. 

2.       Cloud storage systems are updated in real-time and not considered to be backups.  Examples are Dropbox, Google Drive and One Note.  These services are especially useful if you want to access files from multiple devices including mobiles.  They also make it easy to share files with friends and relatives.

3.       Cyndi and Genies pointed out that thumb drives are good for transporting data between platforms but are not intended for every day use.  They are good for a limited number of write cycles and then they fail, leaving disappointment in their wake. 

4.       Genies members recommended My Passport by Western Digital which is a hardware/software backup solution.  The WD Backup software works for both My Passport and My Book and scans for new or changed files on your schedule.  Here is a quick video from 2016 introducing My Passport and My Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIRlpavJgE.

5.       Everyone needs reliable virus protection software. McAfee and Norton are common products.  Linda B. suggested Avast for a free product that they used in the school district where she worked.  Avast detects, viruses, ransomware and other threats in real-time and also secures your passwords in a vault.  There are also paid versions with more features.

6.       Another warning to be heeded is to keep up with changes in hardware and software.  People who have their family trees on media from 10 years ago also have many sad stories.  It’s hard to access floppy disks and it is hard to find programs that can read that data.  When upgrades to hardware or software are offered, don’t hesitate too long to jump on the bandwagon.  When system software upgrades are available, they often have new virus protections included too.  

We talked at length about DNA but I will save that until another day. 

Goodbye for now and enjoy the sunshine while we have it.