6.0.1 Windows 11:
Hello 
Is there some way that I can backup the data I’ve input to Gramps, just in case my system crashes or my laptop is broken or something?
Do poeple still backup things on external hard drives? 
Thanks
In Preferences, on the Family Tree tab, there is a check box to Backup on exit. It allows you to choose the location. The backup name will be the database name with the date and time.
Autobackup backs up while the tree is open. I find the backup on exit is enough.
When you have the backup (or several) it is still a good idea to move the backup to a location off your hard drive.
These backups do not include any media files. You should also backup your media to a location other than the hard drive.
Backups with media can be created by choosing the menu >> Family Trees >> Make Backup. Backup with media files can become quite big fairly quickly so this method is not practical with larger files.
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The “Make a backup” options are explored in more detail in the wiki
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Yes, people still do backups to hard drives. I have 5 connected to my desktop. I backup on exit to a dedicated HD, monthly do a full backup to another drive, also have a copy on a flash drive and our son has a copy of gramps although it is a month out of date. I don’t want to loose 50 years of work because of a computer hardware issue.
Edited to add, that I also have a 20,000 person tree on Ancestry which only has about 7,000 persons verified. On a monthly basis I download a gedcom and create an Ancestry tree in gramps just incase the Ancestry tree gets deleted or I stop paying for the service.
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I simply copy the ~/.local/share/gramps folder to an external drive. This ensures that my plugins and plugin settings are stored - haven’t dug into exactly what is copied into the .gpkg file created by gramps’ backup tool, but not sure that plugins and plugin settings are included.
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Correct. the .gpkg backup is just the database.xml file and any media files attached to the database.
I would argue that the .xml backup file is the more important of the two
as that can be imported into any version (within reason) of GRAMPS but
if you upgrade GRAMPS and try to restore the share folder you will end
up in a mess.
All my media (Family History, Photo’s, Music) is on a backed up NAS and
the GRAMPS “on exit” backups are stored on the same NAS.
The only time I would backup the “share” is if I am going onto a new PC
and going to be using the the same version of GRAMPS.
phil
n 05/05/2025 11:39, Hamkg via The Gramps Project (Discourse Forum &
Mailing List) wrote:
The only file that you should consider backing up from the user’s folder is custom_filters.xml found in the user’s version directory gramps/gramps60. All other files are easily recreated. Although they contain all of your user settings they do not always agree with a new version of Gramps.
The report files found in the /gramps/ folder you may wish to save especially those used when creating Books. Book settings are reusable over time while most standard reports only save the last used settings.
Based on my experience, there are at least two other files you might
want to backup if you have them.
place_formats.xml - this file prevented me from upgrading to Gramps 6.0
until I found it. In Gramps 6.0 on Kubuntu, the file is located in
~/.congig/gramps while for previous versions it was located in ~/.gramps.
If you use the Forms gramplet and you’ve created any custom forms, you
might want to back that up. I wrote some custom definitions that I put
in the file test.xml. For Gramps 5.2 the file was located in
~/.gramps/gramps52/plugins/Form and for Gramps 6.0 the file is in
~/.local/share/gramps/gramps60/plugins/Form.
Allen Crider
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