General Forum

I have a Excel file which I back up also.   I do it because I have other cards in my collection that is not allowed or not listed yet here.   This is for ONLY my PC.

My backup is in Excel as well, for everything. When I update the DB, the spreadsheet gets updated too, whether it's recent pickups or adding/reducing the wantlist. And those spreadsheets are backed up as well.

TCDB is my backup

No backup for me. I've put a lot of faith in TCDB for sure.  Worked well so far!  Fingers crossed/knock on wood.

MS Access. I learned the hard way from the Flickr debacle to not assume any online source will be available to me in the future (which is not  meant to cast any negatives towards this site)

TCDB is sort of my backup, my most accurate tracking source is my spreadsheet for my PC.  Sort of a 1A / 1B.  I also log my PC in Beckett Organize.  Beckett definitely is less useful than TCDB.  I have smaller lists saved in Notes on my iCloud.

My main source for checklist/backup is TCDB, but I also have a word document that I use to for my wants that also serves as a backup of what is missing in each set.  I use this word document as a check and balance for incoming trades that are on and off of TCDB.  I can also print this and take it to card shows. This is much easier that looking up my wants on my phone. With that said, I have nothing that backs up my trade list, so if I lost the trade list data on CDB then it would all have to be manually entered again...yikes!  At that point I would probably fire sale all the base and only load what I feel people would want to trade for. 

For those that use Excel, how do you have your tracking arranged/sorted? I have a hobby of playing around with Excel, but I don't want to add hundreds of tabs if possible. Maybe tabs per year, and then sort by brand, set, subset/insert from there?

That's kind of how I have mine. I'm a set collector with a PC also. I have a separate file for each sport. I set mine up so that I have a mast tab that shows everything that I am chasing. it is set up by year (1948-2023) and brand as seen in here. Insert sets are grouped with brands. I then have a tab for each decade (60s, 70s, 80s, etc.) or 5 years (90-94, 95-99) depending on the number of cards in that grouping; trying to keep each tab manageable. Each tab is mirrored to how how the master tab looks and how the cards appear in here

 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1igyoPMgensV1fljfRzic5WlFq7jc72Vp?usp=sharing