If you are following these comments perhaps you could give us your thoughts before tomorrow, bearing in mind posters have been almost entirely negative.

There is a sense of De Ja Vue here http://pastftm.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/pastftm.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1698&p_created=1067442006. At that time I battled with FTM for 3 weeks until they admitted there was a problem. The software was still marked with the bug for another 2 years, there was no auto update in those days.

DJF@72 I have no issues with the the subscription services but as a UK user who pays both for Ancestry and FindMyPast’s 1911 subscription simply for the census data, I shall probably rationalise with FindMyPast now their census coverage is complete, their indices are better any way. I would not have considered this if it not for the way Ancestry has treated me.

My main file is 19MB with 7,600 persons
The gedcom size is 4.6 MB
File uploaded is to the on line tree is 2.42 MB
The settings are Non Public and Manual sync
Automatic web search is disabled.

It is well nigh impossible to upload a tree after 18:00 GMT. The data uploads fine but the process fails at the “Importing Data into your Ancestry Tree” stage.

During this period we also have numerous instances of the program hanging for periods of about 60 – 90 seconds. As this is cured by
1) logging out of Ancestry or
2) unlinking the online tree

One can only assume that the problem is caused by the program polling service.familytreemaker.com for on line tree changes.

This weekend I tried in the morning period numerous times ( to prove a point) and it never failed once. Also I never suffered a program hang at all.

This to my mind is caused by a familytreemaker.com server load issue I welcome your comments.

Answer received (6 days later) :-

At this time all the Ancestry sites are having extreme site traffic that may cause slowness issues. Also, you may want to try some of the steps in the link below.

Answer Title: Tree Sync Troubleshooting Steps
Answer Link: http://ancestryuk.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ancestryuk.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5433

If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know.

So am I to assume that I can only use the program in the morning. AS unfortunately I work that means I can only use it at weekends.

This is disgraceful IWANT MY MONEY BACK !!!!!!

I also never had a response to my original complaints to Ancestry going on two weeks now and don’t expect to. This program FTM2012 should be pulled off the market. We’ve been nothing but “guinea pigs” for a product that has so many faults, it is beyond comprehension. Also, where is management in all this? All we get is some brief apolgoy and comments like, “The large majority of people are not having issues…” I sincerely doubt that. Many suffer in silence or don’t even know they have issues.

Well, I’ve said enough and Mike, I do wish you the best of luck. As for me, I am going back to using Legacy 7.5 software. At least that is stable genealogy program I can trust and rely upon to be totally accurate. I NEVER would run the risk of ruining my reconstructed tree by using this FTM2012 and it’s so-called sync feature EVER again and I don’t care how many “patches” they issue from this day forward.

I usually do my genealogy over a short period each year at a very intense rate, so I can take out a bunch of short subscriptions and immerse myself in the data. Finding that Ancestry/FTM has screwed up most of that effort may have the effect of setting me back a year until I have time again to do this work.

I found that not only had repositories and citations disappeared but also some of the vital records I’d entered.

The reason I uploaded a new tree was to see if any of the ancestors that didn’t show last time would appear. Some did, but others disappeared. I now have no linked tree there and have to go back to manually trading GEDs and smaller fragments of data with the researchers I was consulting with in Scandinavia. Time’s running out on this and I’ve lost so much time from this year’s work because of the Treesync debacle.

There are many people who don’t give a thought to sourcing their trees and are happy to see that maybe the sync works for them. They don’t delve into really examining the results and think it works fine.

I went back into my Legacy software and printed out a citation and source report and from there will have to reconstruct my citations and sources on my Ancestry tree. Unfortunately, the report I generated goes back to August 11, 2011 so it’s not completely up-to-date as I added a lot more into my Ancestry tree since that date. I can’t think of any other way to correct this mess.

Mike you said you unlinked your tree and uploaded a new one but that won’t help as the sync process changed both databases and unfortunately your original data is lost forever. Did you do a backup of your program in FTM before you did the sync? You might try restoring that one and uploading that to Ancestry as an unlinked tree and see what you come up with. Make sure you compress your file before doing that. Just don’t do the sync again afterwards or you’ll be back to square one again. I have no idea how that will look as I haven’t tried it and don’t intend messing with this program anymore. I just want my tree on Ancestry back to it’s original condition.

As long as the fields don’t match with both the program and Ancestry, it will not work right. Did you take a look on your Ancestry tree citations? I find that a lot my repositories are missing. Also, I notice that where you enter a date of publication that is never picked up by the software; another clue that the two database structures are not the same. I mainly work on my trees on Ancestry.com and all I use genealogy software for is reports and backups so, at this point, any reports I were to generate would be useless to me.

We are all here for one thing…genealogy and not to be messing around with unreliable software that is useless and ruins our years of hard work.

I unlinked my tree and uploaded a new one, but it still doesn’t sync changes upwards. It looks like no progress has been made.