Neither. Too much data corruption. After some exceedingly ugly experiences with Intellishare, I have stopped collaborating entirely. It's not worth it. (I'll explain below.)
After some consistently unfortunate experiences with the master database residing on the flash drive, I have stopped that practice as well. (I'll explain that first.) With the flash drive, Legacy took up the habit of crashing, which meant that I lost information, and lost user settings. This began to happen regularly (daily). When I moved the database to the laptop hard drive, Legacy stopped crashing. Asking around here at IBM, we suspect there is a timing issue. The database engine, perhaps, correctly streams data to/from the hard drive but not the USB flash drive. I now use the flash drive exclusively for trips to the local Family History Center (LDS). It's great for collecting what I need - but not for the Legacy database itself. The last builds of Legacy 5, and the first builds of Legacy 6, introduced a data corruption feature affecting Intellishare. Most likely it had to do with the better formatting capabilities (boldface etc) in the various notes fields - but collaboration was no longer an option. It's been fixed, supposedly, and I've since purchased Legacy 6 to obtain the fix (no fix for Legacy 5). However, it's unlikely we'll go back to collaborating as we originally did. That is, two people independently working on copies of the same database, and then regularly merging the results. There's just too much data corruption to sort out. I'm referring to two different kinds of corruption here. The formatting-related corruption mentioned above caused individual merges to fail. That's been fixed (supposedly; I've not attempted to verify). The general Intellishare problem, though, is not easily resolved - and the result is database corruption. Here are examples of the Intellishare pitfalls. 1. Jo and I both have copies of the database. I discover that two children are actually the same person - Mary and Polly. I merge Mary and Polly to become Mary (alternate name Polly). We merge the two databases, and suddenly Polly reappears - she was deleted in one database and not the other. My discovery that Mary and Polly are the same person, has been thrown away. My collaboration was pointless! 2. I discover that there were TWO people named Truman Day, each a cousin of the other. I had the wrong wife connected to the wrong Truman, each had children, and the children were rather shuffled between the two. Hey, it happens! I carefully unlink and relink everyone, so that everyone's correctly connected to their spouse and parents. After merging the two database copies with Intellishare, we have a badly corrupted mess. Trying to sort things out during the merge just makes things worse. It would have been better if I'd never collaborated at all. (There's a solution, as I'll mention below.) 3. From time to time, someone gets parents "unknown & unknown" with RIN 0 and 0. It can happen from accidentally clicking to add parent, from adding a brother or sister, or importing a small GEDCOM from someone else. Having unknown parents is okay - until you do an Intellishare merge. Merge two copies of the same person, and you then have TWO sets of "unknown & unknown" parents. I've had over 1,000 sets of parents for a single individual, before I realized what was happening. The solution to this third case is pretty easy. Do the "find" for multiple sets of parents. If it's a single person - no brother or sister - simply delete the "unknown & unknown" parents. If there are siblings, you need at least one parent to keep the family connected. I put in something like "Father of John and Barbara" as the father's name, remove the "unknown", and that way things get matched up correctly during each merge. Legacy does an excellent job of merging people with names, but refuses to merge ghosts with RIN of 0. In summary, if you are editing RELATIONSHIPS between people, don't use Intellishare. Deleted people re-appear; moved people become connected to multiple sets of parents. In other words, a corrupted database. Our solution is to send out the master database if needed. Edit the master and return it to the owner. Thus there's no merging of two copies. We don't do simultaneous edits anymore. Edit and return. Another way to look at it is that I have a "read only" copy of the master database. We *do* continue to collaborate - but I don't do any editing of the master database. I simply *look* at it, and send along changes to be made. Ed Barnard Researching SMITH of Cornwall England, Victoria Ontario, Eaton Michigan On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:41:16 -0800, Glen Ballard wrote > John, > > Neither. I have my Legacy database on a flash drive. This way I > can take my data to ANY computer with Legacy installed on it. 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