The question every board asks
What happens if the computer dies
It is the first thing a careful treasurer asks about any record kept on a machine, and the honest answer has two halves: what the program does for you, and what you should still do yourself.
Written by Thomas Sims, who makes Sexton
A cemetery’s register is often the only proof of who owns what. Losing it is not an inconvenience; it is an association that cannot sell a grave, cannot answer a family, and cannot show a board that the money and the ground agree. So the question deserves a real answer rather than the word “backups”.
It is also worth saying that paper has exactly the same problem, and usually worse. A binder exists once. It is in one building, and a flood, a fire, a burst pipe or the back of a car that gets stolen takes the whole thing. Most cemeteries have been running that risk for a century without calling it one.
What Sexton does on its own
- It writes a backup every time you use it, automatically, and keeps the recent ones. You do not have to remember, and there is no setting to get wrong.
- Two computers, shared by your organization. The allowance covers all the organization’s cemeteries. The office desktop and a second machine can both hold the register, which means an ordinary hardware failure costs you the machine and not the records.
- Everything can be written out to plain spreadsheet files at any time, and those files open in Excel with or without Sexton installed.
The five minutes that cover the rest
Automatic backups on the same computer protect you from the software; they do not protect you from the building. For that you need one copy somewhere else, and it does not have to be complicated.
- Buy a flash drive. Any size. The whole register of a small cemetery is smaller than a single photograph from a phone.
- Copy a backup onto it every few months, and after any month with several burials or plot sales.
- Keep it somewhere that is not the office. The treasurer’s house, a safe deposit box, the church safe. Somewhere a fire in one building does not reach.
- Once a year, email an export to two board members. Spreadsheet files, small enough to send, readable by anyone, and now the register exists in three places without a subscription to anything.
That is the whole discipline. It is less work than the binder ever asked for and it covers more.
Restoring
Because the register is a file, restoring is copying it back. Install Sexton on the replacement machine, bring the backup across on the flash drive, and open it. There is no ticket to raise and nobody to wait for, which matters most at exactly the moment you need it — a Tuesday in the middle of arranging a burial, not a convenient afternoon.
If you are ever unsure, call and I will walk through it with you. That is what the support in the price is for.
A note on the cloud argument
Hosted cemetery software will tell you that keeping records on your own machine is the risky choice, and there is a real point in there: their servers are backed up by people who do that for a living. The other half of the trade is less often mentioned. Records in somebody else’s data centre depend on an account nobody loses, a company that stays in business, a bill that keeps being paid, and a connection at the office. A flash drive in the treasurer’s desk depends on none of those things.
Both approaches need a copy somewhere else. The difference is who has to be reachable for you to get it back.
Where Sexton fits
Sexton backs up as you work, includes two computers shared across your organization, and exports everything to spreadsheets any time. More on that in where your records live, and the demonstration shows the export screen among the rest of what it does.