While away on vacation, my new roommate was supposed to care for the animals. He somehow got water all over my rat records book and the ink bled to the point of washing away every bit of information in it. I couldn't recover a thing. Now thankfully, some of my info, I put on excel spreadsheets and I'm attempting to go through that today and redo the records book.

My records book is simple. I write down the location of each tub and what I did with that tub. For example, if I pulled feeders from the tub I'll write down R1T1 - pulled 5.3 feeders from Female X. Each page is for one day that way I can keep better track of litter dates and such. After a while, I update my excel spreadsheets with the info. Right now, every female and every male has their own sheet that includes their name, genetics (color/pattern, and any known recessives), litter information, birthdate (if known), and sex.

Is there an easier way of keeping all this information? I breed for feeders mostly but I also want to play around with genetics so I want to keep accurate records. Now that my record book was destroyed, I'm going to have a time of it recovering the info as its been several weeks, almost a few months since I last updated the excel records.

What do you use for record keeping?