Family Historian User Group

I am now (with forum users help on image links) getting closer to considering upgrading to V4. A couple of years ago I had emailed a 'backup' from FH to myself by way of backup. I had also copied my 'Data' directory onto a stand alone hard disc. Then the hard disc on the laptop crashed and I lost everything on it.

With my new laptop I thought 'that is fine, I'll get my backup from my webmail account' however the file seemed very small and I could not open it or expand it. I did recover the data from my external hard disc which I was very pleased with.

Now I am wondering about upgrading to V4 and wishing go verify that I have good backups in place. My family file has 1161 individuals and 361 families - the backup file is 59.7 KB (61,146 bytes)

Does this sound reasonable?

How can I verify that it is good as a backup - even look at it as a csv or something to see individual records (without FH opening it as the default program for that file type)

many thanks Fergus

ID:4152

Fergus,
If your backup file was made by FH it is just a zipped (compressed) copy of your GEDCOM file and will not contain any of your linked picture files, etc.  It is hard to say whether the file size is reasonable, without knowing how much information about each Individual and Family is stored, and how many Source records there are (which can be much bigger than other records if they contain a lot of source text, e.g. from Gedcom Census).  In any case, you may be able to open the file in WinZip (e.g. by double-clicking in Windows Explorer) and then view the file using any text viewer.  GEDCOM files are just text, and Excel or any other spreadsheet would not be able to view them as csv. But you may also be able to double click on the .ged file in WinZip, when it should open in your current version of FH.  Provided you don't save it, neither your current main GEDCOM file, nor your existing backup file, would be affected by this.