misiing census record flag in diagrams
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Robert Jordan
After Ancestry Sources stopped automatically adding the census record flag to diagrams I set up in the Diagram options under box the following conditions "expression =IsTrue(%INDI.CENS[year=1841].SOUR>_TYPE% = "Census")" One for each of the relevant census years with an appropriate flag.
That worked perfectly well until recently. Whoever I chose to display a diagram for the diagram showed the flags for any census they were recorded as being on. |
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What version of FH are you using? It should make little difference but nice to know.
I think you saying that the SAME Individual when shown in different Diagrams with the SAME Options displays Census icons differently. The only thing that differs between the Diagrams is the Diagram Root Person. The Box Conditions appear to be the same but in the Box Features are the Census Icons correctly selected? If you open the Property Box for such Individuals and check their Census events do they have appropriate Dates and Citations? Try changing the Scale of the Diagram or move boxes apart. Do the Icons then reveal themselves?
Mike Tate
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Robert Jordan
Hi Mike I am using version 7 and since posting on the Group I have done a bit more research, Just before this happened FH crashed when saving data from Ancestral Sources. I restored the data and all the records were restored. The problem manifest itself when I opened a diagram of a person who is not a close relative when no flag icons were showing even though there was a census fact in the individual's record, except when I opened a diagram with me as the root person and then all flag icons were showing with the exception of the 2021 census. I have opened a backup copy of my family tree which was taken before FH crashed. In this back up all the icons show up correctly. This leads me to believe that the crash of FH somehow corrupted a file, not the main ged.com file but another which somehow sets the settings. The problem is I don't know which file is the culprit. If the worse comes to the worst I can restore the backed up copy to the principal drive and then add all the records I have amended since this happened I have reported it to Calico Pie but if you have any ideas I would welcome them Robert On Sun, 22 Aug 2021 at 19:10, Mike Tate <post@...> wrote:
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Why do you say the corrupted file is not the GEDCOM file? I suspect it must be the GEDCOM file that is at fault. Exactly what sort of backup did you restore? Was it a standard FH Project Backup ZIP file?
You did not answer the question about whether the SAME Individual appears in a Diagram in which icons show and also in a Diagram in which they don’t.
Your Box Condition expressions rely on not only a Census fact with a valid Date but also a Citation of a Source with a Type of Census. You say you checked there was a Census fact but did you check the first Citation references a Census Source record? If the old GEDCOM has all those characteristics but the current GEDCOM does not for SOME Individuals then that is the corruption.
If and only if my suspicions are confirmed by you then the solution is a File > Merge/Compare File. However, there is a knack to using that so don’t do NOT experiment unless you are 100% sure of what you are doing.
It is crucial that you answer as many of my questions as possible.
Mike Tate
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Robert Jordan
Thank you Mike Perhaps I should explain in more detail. I am very meticulous when it comes to FH I have my project on 5 different external hard drives, one of which is never used while connected to the internet. This is to prevent any possible hacking or failure of the computer or a particular hard drive. Some time ago when inputting data from Ancestral Sources FH inexplicably crashed.At that time I used the backup to restore the project without any difficulty. When FH crashed while updating last week at first I used the ~fh6DAC.tmp file which I believed was a file designed to create a sort of back up in the event of FH crashing. That did not work so I then used the standard back up which I had created only minutes before the crash. On the face of it that seemed to work as all the records were there as well as all the census facts which led me to believe that some file other than the ged.com file was corrupted as the census flags were not being shown correctly. I have to say that in the process of restoring there were a large number of exclusions but when I verified the message was that it was OK. I have nearly 6000 census images so that would equate to many more thousands of census fact citations which would have been impossible to correct even if there was a facility to do so You are correct in saying that in addition to the census event fact the citation should also be there and on investigation these were mostly missing. At this point I cannot remember whether I clicked on the zipped file or extracted the file it contained to activate the restore. Either way there seems to be something wrong with the backup/restore process. If one cannot restore by clicking the compressed file there should have been a warning to extract the file contained within it before restoring. the project. If it is not that then something is wrong with the back up process for the ged.com file to be corrupted. I have now used the Snapshot facility to mostly restore my project and on reflection perhaps I should have done that in the first place as I have only lost a handful of records and the census flag icon is now showing. What worries me is that there must be thousands of FH users who are not as IT literate as me and who rely on the software to do the right thing, in these circumstances I believe it is clearly failing. To answer your question "
You
did not answer the question about whether the SAME Individual appears
in a Diagram in which icons show and also in a Diagram in which they
don’t" The census flag icon appears on some people but not on others. So for example on a diagram with me in it the census 2011 flag shows but not for the 2021 census. In the case of my father the 1939 registration the census flag shows but it does not show for other people who are recorded as being on the 1939 Registration. It is clear that the citation became excluded from some records during the back/restore process Robert On Sun, 22 Aug 2021 at 21:24, Mike Tate <post@...> wrote:
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Robert, with respect, your backup regime does not appear to include building disaster protection. These days additional backups in the cloud are essential.
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So contrary to your claim that it can’t be the GEDCOM file that is at fault, it is the GEDCOM file that has lost some Citations for some Census facts for some people. That means those same people will show the same Census icons regardless of which Diagram they appear in, which is what I was trying to discover.
When you create a Project Backup you use the FH File > Backup/Restore commands. To recover a Project Backup you must also use the FH File > Backup/Restore commands. The clue is in the name Backup & Restore. I advise against manipulating the backup ZIP files outside FH. That is all explained in the FH Help page for Backups: https://www.family-historian.co.uk/help/fh7/hh_start.htm#backups.html
Also, you should not be tinkering with ~fh6DAC.tmp files that are a side effect of a failure and a recipe for disaster.
I am not comfortable with the idea of having the same live Project stored in five different places. How do you synchronise them?
Snapshots are a good way of recovering GEDCOM only data but do not cover any other Project files such as Media. That is explained in the FH Help page for the Snapshot Manager: https://www.family-historian.co.uk/help/fh7/hh_start.htm#snapshotmanager.html
There is also the FHUG Knowledge Base advice on Backup and Recovery that I strongly suggest you read and understand: https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/backup-and-recovery/ In particular, FH Project Backups and Snapshots do NOT backup your customised Diagrams, Reports, Queries, Plugins, Fact Sets, etc, etc…
Have you now recovered your Project to a satisfactory state or do you need to merge the Project that has all the Census Citations with the later Project that has recently added records?
It may also be a good idea to discuss your Backup regime as it has clearly let you down.
Mike Tate |
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Robert Jordan
Dear Trevor With respect I have to disagree with you. Firstly, the data stored on the cloud is as easy to hack into as anything else so it would not be wise to store any personal or sensitive data in the cloud. Secondly, I have over 500 GByte of data which would cost in the region of £120 per year to obtain cloud storage. That is enough to buy two 1 Terabyte hard drive devices per year if anything should go wrong with them. Thirdly, the internet is often going down in which case you lose access to your data, whereas I will always have it under control. Fourthly If anything should happen to me unexpectedly, then other people may experience not only difficulties in accessing the data but also additional costs in downloading it or transferring it. Fifthly as far as disaster protection is concerned, one of my hard drive devices is kept off my premises so that in a disaster and the house was completely destroyed .I would still have access to my data. I would think very carefully about using cloud storage. I would recommend that you have at least one external hard drive device, they only cost about £60, to give you peace of mind. Robert On Mon, 23 Aug 2021 at 10:51, Trevor Rix <trevor@...> wrote: Robert, with respect, your backup regime does not appear to include building disaster protection. These days additional backups in the cloud are essential. |
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Robert, with all due respect, some of your comments contain a number of misconceptions.
Firstly, there is some truth in cloud security issues but they are minimal as most of the data is in the public domain already, which is probably where you obtained it. There are far more fruitful targets for hackers to attack. On the other hand, purely local storage has its own risks due to fire, flood, theft, hardware failure, etc. However, I recognise that your fifth point compensates for most of those risks and I agree local storage is a worthwhile extra backup.
Secondly, I purchase Office 365 for £60 per year that gives me the latest office products on several devices plus 1 Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. So that is twice what you need at half the cost, and with Office 365 included, which is NOT a cloud product but installed apps (Word, Excel, etc) on my PC.
Thirdly, if the Internet is down you still have full access to all your data which is stored on both your PC and in the cloud and on any other PC synchronised to the same OneDrive account. It is a common misconception that you need Internet access to use OneDrive data which is not true.
Fourthly, as explained above, your data is on your PC just like now, so other people will have no problem accessing it. You could even arrange with such people to share your OneDrive account so they have backup copies all the time.
Mike Tate
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Robert,
I have multiple backups in multiple places, and over four decades of computer experience. My FTTP broadband has not gone down for over five years now. My Family Historian is set to save every minute as I work to my desktop PC drive C, to Windows File History on an external drive, and to Dropbox. The same applies for other frequently used programs/data. I also use ARQ that automatically backs up the whole of my drive C to Dropbox several times a day. In addition I make periodic backups to several external hard drives, Aomei Backuppper and Windows to create hard drive images, and six other cloud destinations for non-critical data. In the context of this topic, corrupted Family Historian data, if I ever encountered an issue I could easily restore at one minute intervals back in time until I find an uncorrupted version. I have always paid extra for Dropbox Packrat that gives me unlimited version history forever, and unlimited access to deleted data forever; which for me is cheap insurance. Dropbox is secure enough for my purposes. Since 2009 I have never encountered a problem with Dropbox. https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/how-security-works Trevor |
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Robert Jordan
Mike Just to be absolutely clear. After restoring the project it looked OK as I had not noticed the many citations had gone missing. Apart from that everything was normal all the records were there as were the facts in the property box. That led me to believe that another file had been corrupted. I have been in contact with Calico Pie who have admitted that the back up process had "truncated" the backup file. So it was perfectly reasonable for me to say that it was not the ged.com file as that on the face of it, it looked to be OK. The problem was caused by another file in the backup/restore process which had truncated the ged.com file used in the back up and then the restore process, so I was right in my initial analysis. You say you are not comfortable with having the same live project stored in 5 different location. Let me explain. I have two Hard drives connected to the Router. One (Main drive)is used for everyday working and is switched on all day. The other is used only for the purposes of backing up the first drive and is switched on daily only whilst backing up so that it has minimal access to the internet in the event of hacking. I did have a problem with the main hard drive some years ago which had to be replaced however, it was a very simple task to download all the data from the back up hard drive to the new main drive. In addition I have two portable hard drives. connected to computers by USB ports. They are generally not connected. One is connected only for the purpose of backing up from the main drive and is then disconnected. The second is only connected when the internet connection is switched off and is used to back up from the other portable hard drive. This portable hard drive is backed up once a week as it is kept off premises should a disaster occur and the remaining hard drives are destroyed. All the other backups are backed up daily so thy will be identical. For the sake of completeness the fifth back up is to a memory stick which I used to used to store the FH data but which I no longer use regularly but find useful if I go to another location where I want to use FH. This too is backed up daily so that I always have have access to the latest data in FH. I use AllwaySync software for all these backups, this is excellent software and it takes less than two minutes to back up changes to my FH project which is time well spent as far as I am concerned. Perhaps you should review your own backing up regime. With regard to your comments about reading the knowledge base. I restored my project some months ago after FH crashed without any reason I read the manual and followed the instructions and everything was OK. Recently I followed the same procedure and things went wrong. Now I would put it to you that suppose some months ago you had a puncture, you read the manual and successfully changed the wheel. Then yesterday you had another puncture you followed the same procedure as before and the wheel fell off. Would you care to be told that you should have read the manual again before attempting the second wheel change, I think not. In my case the problem lay with the back up/restore process not anything I did wrong as I described earlier. Robert On Mon, 23 Aug 2021 at 11:46, Mike Tate <post@...> wrote:
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Robert, You have gradually provided a lot more background to this issue following your initial posting. I was only trying to help based on the information you provided. Since it turns out to be a fault in the FH program that Calico Pie will presumably fix, then you no longer need my assistance.
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