Advice sought on making RM9 my data mastering system

RootsMagic
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1

For the past 2 years I have been using FTM 2019 on the Mac for my data mastering and research. I had originally switched from RM v7 packaged to run on Mac. The reason for my change was a combo of personal priority, indicators for limited life support for RM v7 and delay issues associated with the emergence of RM v8. More recently I have avoided RM v8 given Mac stability, quality and performance issues already identified in this forum. Now with release of RM v9 I’m ready to give it go, especially with exciting announce of support for Associations.

I am very well acquainted with the family historian predicament of data loss for Gedcom file exchanges between differing vendor products. So my first question:

  1. Which is best way to migrate data from FTM 2019 to RM v9 avoiding / minimising data loss?
    a) Export Gedcom file from FTM and then import into RM v9? [I understand there is likely data loss with this approach.]
    b) Export a native FTM 3.1 file from FTM, import into RM v7 (as native pre FTM 2014), then import RM v7 into RM v9? [More hurdles, but avoids Gedcom.]

  2. Have any members put together a standard Gedcom v5.5.1 standard compliance check for RM import / export [to be updated of course for v9]? [I am extremely concerned about potential data loss about any move from FTM, in particular in the area of sources and citations - a subject area of infamy when it comes to vendors interpreting the Gedcom standard differently I understand.]

  3. RM v7 really was/is a gold standard tool. I’ve noticed in forum contributions that there are identified instances of function drop when compared to RM v8. Aside from new capability introduced in RM v9, there are also some examples of dropped function being reintroduced e.g. export HTML. So has anyone compiled a feature comparison between RM v7, v8, v9 that they can share? [Gedcom alignment is part of this too.]

Getting some reasonable answers to the above will greatly assist my deliberations about using RM v9 as my data mastering system. Hope some kind folk can help, thank you.

2

GEDCOM Validator (Website here) is a handy program to test the validity of gedcom files.

3

As a FTM user I transfer data to RM via a gedcom but another option is to download from ancestry into a new RM tree. This will require a lot of cleanup of source names and media names.

Rm8 for mac users was clearly a customer guinea pig beta test platform since 9 was released with a print manual and a full set to videos on day 1. Old and new bugs are showing up on the forum so it is early to switch over. I am hopeful but it took a year before 8 stopped AV crashes every few minutes.

4

Thank you. Is there a version available for the Mac, I do not use PC windows.

5

Thank you for the helpful advice … looks like a good thing to wait for a while before attempting to cut over. There is another option to transfer data - but one I’ve kept “in my back pocket” given its experimental status - I’ve written my own Gedcom import / export tool - if you control the code, then that allows one to build in custom tweaks to support inter vendor app migration. But for now that is an option of last resort.