Today I spent about 2 hours organizing my electronic files for genealogy.  Currently it only sits at about 900 megs, but you never know how fast it is going to grow.  I decided to do a general folder "genealogy", and from there break it down to surnames: DECKER, JACKSON, KONDRC, MACZEK, ect.

From there I went to my old folders on the drive and moved the files into the correct folders for the surnames.  Originally I had Folders for Census, Death Cert, Birth Cert, Military, ect, and everything was getting to spread out.  I hope the way I have changed to will help me try and keep things together.

Once I moved all the files into the SURNAME folders, I went to each folder, and created the names of the family members inside there.  Right now I see the issue once people are married to start tying things together, but I think this should be good enough to keep everything together for me.

Once I complete my transition, I am going to use my thumb drive (4gb) and the program Always Sync to make a backup of my genealogy to the thumb drive.  I will also make a second copy to an external drive.  I usually keep one thumb drive on me at all times with this information, and will probably get a second thumb drive to leave in the house.

I know that thumb drives will probably not live for 20 years, and if they did there would be the issue of being able to read the format of the files left on the thumb drives.  Basically anytime you believe that archiving is done once you copy your files to a backup source you are mistaken.  It is a living process, which needs continual checking, updating, and adding to.  Over at slash dot today they were talking about back up issue's, and this is what led me to start the reorganization of my files, and then thinking of the best, most economical backup procedures.