Setting Up Your Shadow Copy

UPDATE February 2021:

I searched to find this post to help someone this morning and realized that it is almost 9 years old!  The crazy thing about that is that Historian (formerly Memory Manager) is such a stable program that the instructions and screenshots are still basically the same.  So please note: these instructions work for Forever's Historian software now just as they did when the software was called Memory Manager and was owned by Creative Memories.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

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Let's cut to the chase: I would have purchased Memory Manager just for this feature alone.  It's a small price to pay to have all of my tens of thousands of photos secured for me almost automatically.  (I say almost because it only works if I have my external hard drive plugged in.)

Throughout my history with personal computers, I've always heard that you have to save your work.  Save your work.  It's an automatic thing for me now to save every time I pause when I'm working on a project.  But we've come to a point where just hitting save isn't the safeguard it used to be, because now we work our computers so much more and expose them to so many more potential threats, that it's not a matter of if the hard drive will fail, but when.  Unfortunately, it often happens without warning.

So for several years now I've been beating a new drum: get an external hard drive!  Get the biggest that you can afford.  There was a time when a 160 Gb hard drive would do the trick, but not any more.  The photo files are getting larger, and so is everything else.   The beautiful thing is that most external drives don't take up a lot of space and there always seem to be sales and coupons out there so it's not hard to get a great deal.

Once you have that external hard drive, all you really need to do is plug it in and you have loads of back up storage space.  And here's where the Shadow Copy feature in Memory Manager comes in.  Once you set this up, the program will automatically back up not just your new photos, but any information about how you've organized or edited it, EVERY time you close the program.

Here's how it works:  Open Historian and go to your Media Library.  (You'll want to set this up for each one if you have more than one.)

Once in your Media Library, click on the Vault tab at the top.  Click on the icon that says Shadow Copy.

From there you'll see a box open up that will guide you through the rest of the process.

Go ahead and click on Start Protection.  Now you'll get to choose where you want to store the automatic copy of your vault that will be created by the Shadow Copy.  Click on the Browse button to choose the location for your backup file.

NOTE: It's important to make sure that you browse to the external hard drive so that the back up is in a separate location from your original vault.  Obviously, if you created a Shadow Copy onto your main hard drive (and your memory vault was also located there), you would still lose everything if it crashed.

Once you have chosen the location for your Shadow Copy, you have two options.  You can simply click Close and then the Shadow Copy will automatically update when you close the program.  Or (and this is my preference), you can click the Update Now button and have it update the Shadow Copy immediately.

And that's really all there is to it!  Memory Manager will automatically update any changes you have made every time you close the program (as long as your external drive is connected).  It doesn't get any easier than that!

Enjoy!