Family Historian User Group

I bought FH7 today after finishing a 30 day trial. I'm switching from RM8. I want to have a solid backup strategy for my FH7 projects. My plan is to keep time-staggered, full backups, on two removable thumb drives. I believe the other thing that I need is a backup of my FH7 settings. I plan to also save these on the same thumb drives. My question is which Backup & Restore plugin should I use? The Plugin Store has one developed by Mike Tate and another developed by Mark Draper. Which should I use? What are the pros and cons of each? TIA

I'm sure both authors will be along but there's some info here:

Backup and Restore FH Settings via Windows - new plugin (20544)

I used to use the Mike Tate plugin, but as a confident Windows user, I'm finding the new Mark Draper otion simpler and more convenient.

Both plugins work well. I have used the Mike Tate plugin for years. I find it very easy to use and don't see any need to change to the Mark Draper plugin. I have used both and I think the Mike Tate plugin is a little slower, but not enough to cause me any problems.

Bill

This summary in the Knowledge Base gives an overview of backup strategies and the pros and cons of the two different plugins.

The key difference is probably that mine is easier to use for newcomers to FH while giving power users additional options, while Mike's is very familiar to established users so if it works for you there is no reason to change.

Try both, and see which user interface you are more comfortable with.

The differences between the two plugins are largely historic. My plugin was originally written years ago for FH V5 and updated for each new version. It had to cope with features of FH V5 and FH V6 that have been improved in FH V7 such as Diagram Icon files must now be inside the FH ProgramData settings Icons folder where previously they could be anywhere on disk. So Mark's plugin and power user variants don't have to analyze Diagram files in search of Icon files and that makes the process much simpler.

However, there are features of my old plugin that are not offered in the new plugin.
1) Component settings can be backed up or restored selectively depending on the modified date of the master file and the backup file. i.e. Old versions can overwrite newer versions or not as required.
2) Image files inserted into Diagrams are included in the backup. Such files can be anywhere on disk and require Diagram files to be analyzed. However, users can mitigate that by ensuring those files are within either the FH ProgramData folder or the Project folder and then the new plugin will automatically include them.