If this were your bank account, would you accept this?

• multiple data corruptions, on-going over several years

• disappearing data

• non-existant or “ghost” info as the help desk called the issue  duplicates

• syncing and downloading performance problems

• non-existant backups

and, would you pay hundreds of dollars for this kind of poor performance?

I’m referring to ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker.

Details:
Multiple data corrputions, over several years, have happened with my ancertry.com family tree, ranging from disappearing source citations; an indication, say, of 4 hints but none appear; multiple instances of duplicate people; syncing issues with Family Tree Maker for Mac 3, and downloading a tree from Ancestry that caused data corruption on the ancestry.com tree, and non-existent backups.)

Here’s what happened and why this complaint has been posted.

After repeated contact, I have determined Ancestry’s support staff is unable to resolve these issues and even is unable to determine the cause of the data corruptions. (Yes, media takes more time than just syncing. Media was allowed to run all night and, by FTMM3’s own media processing bar, was completely downloaded. Not the case. Double-checking found random missing census images and duplicates that were cleared on Ancestry before downloaded to a newly-made tree in FTMM3.) Fast-forward, countless hours spent re-entering corrupted data, only to have it corrupted, again.

Fixes:

1) Logging or tracing capabilities—components of many other software programs, should be used to understand why these poor performance issues happen.

Software developers for financial institutions, where data corruption simply cannot happen, have this experience and knowledge. Ancestry should hire some of these developers.

If this capability is available, either in the desk-top software or in ancestry.com itself, the support people know nothing about it. For what is supposed to be the premier program, this is unacceptable. Ancestry.com is an expensive option and users should not be burdened with this problem.

2) Backups— A backup and restore capability built in to ancestry.com is needed. Companies such as Mozy, BackBlaze, Carbonite, and Acronis do this very thing. Hire some of their developers and get the job done.

That backup system should include the capability to be requested manually or automatically. Preferably both kinds of systems would exist. At the very minimum, daily backups should be kept in the system for a month, weekly backups kept for several months, and monthly backups kept six months.

GEDCOMs are unacceptable since source citations and images do not accompany this option. Syncing with Family Tree Maker because of its corrputions of data is also unacceptable. In fact, Ancestry.com has divested itself of Family Tree Maker and provides only a phone number to a developer that keeps bankers hours. Family Tree Maker has become a third party. Relying on a third-party to do reliable backups is asking for disaster.

No software is perfect. Users make mistakes. Therefore, a backup and easy-to-restore data should be available as part of Ancestry.

These are the minimums required to have accurate and reliable family history software programs. Ancestry asks to be paid at a premium rate but does not deliver even the rudimentary safeguards to its customers.

If anyone else has similar issues, please join me to convince Ancestry.com to get their software up to 21st Century standards.