I'm not quite "silver" yet, but being an engineer in a technology industry, I live by the saying "Back up, Back up & Back up again!"
At work I keep getting problems with a product we deal with where the server hard disk fails and we have to rebuild the server. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these "mission critical" servers are never backed up, and the customer has to spend hours reinputting.
Best thing is do as I do..... Buy a USB External hard disk, and regularly back up FTM to your laptop hard disk (the default setting), then back it up to your USB hard disk. Also export the tree as a Gedcom file to your USB hard disk. I also have a folder on the laptop that has all of the documents categorized by family, I copy that to the USB disk.
I do that about once a month, and recently I've started exporting the Change Log to a PDF file every time I sync, that gives an indication of what changes have been made.
It's not perfect - the USB drive can fail as well, or if your house catches fire or floods you could lose it all, but some people keep 2 USB disks and leave one at a family members for safe keeping.
At work I keep getting problems with a product we deal with where the server hard disk fails and we have to rebuild the server. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these "mission critical" servers are never backed up, and the customer has to spend hours reinputting.
Best thing is do as I do..... Buy a USB External hard disk, and regularly back up FTM to your laptop hard disk (the default setting), then back it up to your USB hard disk. Also export the tree as a Gedcom file to your USB hard disk. I also have a folder on the laptop that has all of the documents categorized by family, I copy that to the USB disk.
I do that about once a month, and recently I've started exporting the Change Log to a PDF file every time I sync, that gives an indication of what changes have been made.
It's not perfect - the USB drive can fail as well, or if your house catches fire or floods you could lose it all, but some people keep 2 USB disks and leave one at a family members for safe keeping.