James Tanner warns us about using GEDCOM. Info stored in a way that it is only portable by GEDCOM might be lost.
“Even if you were successful in having someone in your family accept the information in GEDCOM format, it is very likely that much of the value of the information would be lost.“
- “The Dangers of Using GEDCOM“, by James Tanner, at Genealogy’s Star (Apr. 13, 2019).
This is exactly what I see. Use GEDCOM if you have to, but you’d be better off getting away from the idea that your info is so special it deserves to be isolated in an inaccessible format. Get your data out of your standalone program and into one of the online programs pronto. You’ll never recover some of it, because you used a bad technology too long.
Update Nov. 5, 2019. Same warning from Dick Eastman, Bob Coret, and Nigel Munro Parker:
- “Don’t Want to Lose (Parts of) Your Genealogical Data?“, by Bob Coret, at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter (Nov. 5, 2019), retrieved Nov. 4, 2020.
Edited to fix broken link.