Thursday, August 17, 2023

Memories Restoration Tool:

 Memories Restoration Tool:  

About a year ago, some photos, documents, and stories were lost during a failed backup of FamilySearch Memories. I contacted FamilySearch when I discovered that some of my photos were no longer accessible, and was basically told, "Please be patient, the engineers are working on it." Last night I had a phone call from one of the engineers. He apologized, and told me that they now have a tool available now that allows us to restore these items (or delete the otherwise un-deletable memory pages.) He also apologized that the tool cannot automatically find the missing files.

Fortunately, I have almost all of my photos backed-up to the same folder, which means that I did very little searching for files. The tool is at https://www.familysearch.org/memories/restore and it requires you to be signed in to your FamilySearch account. 

The tool brings up a list of the lost files and their names and keeps a running tally of my progress. Once I had the tool pointing in the correct directory things went quite smoothly. I quickly got into the rhythm: Click the file name of the photo to copy it to the clipboard > Paste it into the search form > Press Enter > Click the Upload File button, then select the next file to upload, and continue.

Things did not go so smoothly for the lost stories, many of which I had composed in FamilySearch Memories and existed nowhere else in that form. But at least I have a tool to help me identify which ones need my attention.