I have a subscription to ancestry.com, and have been wanting to start using a genealogy program here on my local machine. This is partly to be able to work on the data when there are ancestry.com server problems, but mostly because I want a local backup of the state of my data - all of it, not just a gedcom file.

The obvious first thing to consider was ancestry.com's own product - FTM 2008. But if it won't initialise its local data using what's stored under your ancestry.com username on their servers then FTM 2008 is no particular use to me. If it can't manage to synchronise the local data and my ancestry.com data thereafter then it's even less use.

The expanding popularity of the web browser based interface to ancestry.com makes a powerful case for using FTM 2008 as an additional local machine interface, one keeping its own copy of the data and synchronising each way with the copy on ancestry.com's servers. That it apparently doesn't do this is an astonishing oversight in someone's business model. It certainly means I won't buy it, and it goes a long way towards undermining the longer-term usefulness of my ancestry.com subscription.

Dale