Something that we are always told we should do, but most often, we think “that won’t happen to me ” or “I’ll do that someday”. Don’t take the chance with your family history. You’ve worked too hard researching to find the information and citing your sources and what about all the photos that you’ve found.
There are two types of emergencies that can happen. You can have your computer crash and you lose all your information.. or heaven forbid something happens to you home.
So you can handle this in several ways. For the first situation you can purchase an external hard drive and set it up so that it backs up your system daily or at least weekly. I have a shadow copy that backs up each day. A shadow copy is exactly that, a shadow copy of my entire computer so, should my computer crash I could get a new computer or flatten the one that crashed if it’s possible and then re-install the shadow copy. The best part is that external hard drives aren’t nearly as expensive as they once were.
For the second event then some thing out of your home is a better approach. For this situation you might want to think about Dropbox, Evernote or Backblaze or any other off site back up system.
Don’t let it be the “hard way” that you learn your lesson.