Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one changed my genealogy life.
Resist the urge to print
As a professional organizer, I know what a problem paper clutter can be. And I know how hard it can be to access unfiled paper (and so much paper is unfiled!). So I am a huge proponent of not printing genealogy documents I find online. Instead, I encourage you to download and file them.
The key to feeling confident about downloading, rather than printing, is to have a reliable file-naming protocol and folder structure so that you can find the documents. Mine is detailed in this post, but yours might be different. That’s great, as long as it works for you. When you download and file digitally, rather than print and file or put into binders, your documents are always at your fingertips when you’re at your computer, even if you’re at a library or repository. It can be a mindset shift, but I think it’s worth it.
It’s important to mention, as was brought up in the comments to this post, that it’s absolutely essential to backup your hard drive if you’re going to store your documents digitally. I wrote about this in my last quick tip.
For extensive information on going paperless in your genealogy research, check out the Paperless Genealogy Guide I wrote with scanning expert Brooks Duncan, available for purchase at his website, DocumentSnap.
Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash
100%!
It was once a part of my job to organize other people’s paper, among other things.
Lawyers love paper. The solidity. The feel. Let me share a story about how I changed a former paper lover’s mind about the limits of paper. We were working on a Very Big Case that spanned the country and involved (literally) thousands of stakeholders. When the courts began to accept electronic submissions, it became a legal tactic to flood the opponent with reams of pages. Nevertheless, our team insisted on printing and binding every piece. We filled a room and kept going. (Legal cases can span decades.) One Friday late afternoon, we received a submission. “Print this,” said my team. “It’s thousands of pages,” I said, “Are you sure?” From that Friday to late Sunday, I printed and bound one submission. It filled a full rolling cart, ate 10,000 sheets of paper, and filled 24×3″ binders, double sided. When my team returned to the office, they saw the cart and said, “We can’t take that to court!”
Of course I knew that. “Court” was a series of hearings for months, touring through dozens of small towns. We needed the literal evidence before our eyes, and the stark reality of what law now looked like. After that weekend, we mindfully switched to incorporating and relying on electronic systems.
Here are my key components of filing: any system you choose must do the following: use it, file it, find it, safely store it, and think about the future (legacy).
I’ve been blissfully reading your tips this morning, and nodding so hard my head may come loose. 🙂
Call me – A Fan.
Linda Yip
Thanks for sharing that story, Linda! My head started spinning at the notion of that quantity of paper! I agree with your key components of a filing system. Thanks for you sharing. And thanks for the day-brightening comment!
I agree so whole-heartedly. It was liberating for me. For readers who are hesitant, try it for a week. At the end of the week, if you like, you can print out that week’s doccuments. (Tell your File Explorer or Finder to display your files as a list, by date order, so they’ll be grouped together. Select the week’s files and print them.) I think that next week you’ll say, “I know where those images are, and they’ve been backed up. I don’t need to print them.”
What a great idea to suggest just giving it a try for a week, Marian! Thanks.
I love trees, and I hate paying for printer ink, so I *really* like this, BUT, what about posterity?
Paper never changes, unlike tech, (remember 8 tracks? really floppy disks?) so what do I leave and how do I leave it for my children? The format I save things in, may be obsolete for my grandchildren.
I understand your concern and creating some sort of family history book might address it. But for the actual files, I feel that jpg and pdf (and similar) files saved on a hard drive are pretty safe from becoming obsolete. Those file types have been around for almost 30 years. What might change is the medium upon which those files are transferred or read. But if you stay up to date with technology and, if possible, pass the files while you’re living to an interested descendant, you might feel secure that they’ll be available for your grandchildren. This is definitely the sort of thing with which different people have different comfort levels.
The key to using this system is to make sure you have lots of digital backups. I just had my hard drive crash, and had a backup this time, but I have lost lots of genealogy information because of a previous hard drive crash, and wished I had printed my findings.
Yes! Backing up is absolutely critical. I should have put a sentence in about that in this Quick Tip. I’ll amend it now. Thanks for your comment.
It’s not a question of iF your computer will crash, but rather WHEN your computer will crash.
That’s right! You have to be prepared.