So you probably have a ton of files saved in the SmartFile system. That’s probably a good thing considering thousands of hard drive crashes occur each year in the US alone, but what if you leave a company and want to physically hand your former colleagues a copy of all the files you had?
What if you are going on a vacation to rural America without Internet and you need to take some important files with you? What about creating a backup of personal files to pass to the family if the unspeakable happens? You will want all those Family Tree files you worked so hard to collect to be available to your decedents.
Here is a quick overview of how to use SmartFile to select, archive and copy multiple files to a CD or DVD:
- Select multiple files in SmartFile using the checkboxes down the right side.
- Click the download button in the SmartFile toolbar.
- You’ll get a dialog that lets you choose what type of archive file to download.
- You can choose a .zip or tar file if you are going to put the files on a usb thumb drive or another device you are taking with you.
- You could also choose an .iso file. Then you can use your CD/DVD burning software to burn that .iso directly to a disk. You could also potentially use that .iso file with a Virtual Machine or Virtual Drive. I recently used the .iso feature to get some drivers into my Virtual Machine.
Archiving files is a great way to compress files and make them easier to transport. Blank CD’s are cheap, light and you can use them on any computer with an optical disc drive. Just like USB jump drives and external hard drives, backing-up files to a CD/DVD can be cumbersome and slow. We always recommend you make SmartFile the nucleus of your digital asset management strategy, but having additional copies of data elsewhere can’t hurt.
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