Picasa 2.0 Makes Photo Backup a Breeze, So Back Up Your Photos!

[Jason Dunn]

I read a message in a forum recently where the user was bemoaning the loss of a year's worth of photos. He had a backup solution in place, but was only backing up his work files and not his photos. Although that seems ridiculous to me to not back up <i>all</i> one's data, I can't throw too many stones: in March of 2000 I accidentally deleted my Outlook PST file with years worth of data on it, and was only able to recover part of it. Since then I've taken data backup <i>very</i> seriously. No matter how many times I tell my friends to back up their data, most don't until they too lose some data. What is it about human psychology that makes us feel immune to a problem until we have that problem? If someone has the answer to that, I have a Nobel Peace Prize for you. ;-)<br /><br />Back to the point, I was thinking about photo backup. Although I have my photos backed up locally over my network to four computers, I didn't have a backup on optical disc. So I fired up Picasa and used a feature I've never used before: the Backup your Pictures function. It first asked me which drive I wanted to use because it detected both, which was a nice touch instead of assuming that I was going to use one over the other. I then clicked "Select All" to grab all of my photos, and clicked Burn.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/picasa-backup.jpg" /><br /><br />My 9700 or so photos took three DVDs to back up - Picasa didn't bother me with a burning dialog to select speed, it just asked for a DVD and started burning. Perfect! I particularly liked that I could keep using Picasa while the burn process worked away, and I could also minimize Picasa and the burn process indicator remained docked in the bottom right of my screen.<br /><br />Picasa is a fantastic tool for backing up your photos, so if you haven't done so already, <a href="http://www.picasa.com">download Picasa</a>, grab a few blank CDs or DVDs, and back up your photos...before something happens to make you wish you had.

[Mr. MacinTiger]

Jason,

You are dead-on right, man. I had an external Firewire drive with my old Power Mac that I kept all my iPhoto libraries on. I only backed up sporadically...uh-oh :oops: The drive came unplugged accidentally while the computer was accessing it and it FRIED THE DRIVE. I had to pay $2200 (my whole tax rebate that I had just gotten in the mail) to recover the photos of my daughter's first year. Boy oh boy was my wife POed at me!

Anyway, lesson learned. I now back up my iPhoto libraries, my email archives, and my Quicken data files at least every 2 weeks.

Thanks for highlighting this useful feature of Picasa...As I mull over switching back to Wintel systems in a few years (depending on how the whole Macintel thing plays itself out), I'll be sure to keep an eye on Picasa and it would be one of my first downloads. It's a very slick piece of software, Mac-like in design :)

[Tim Williamson]

I haven't had a chance to try Picasa's backup ability, but since we're on the topic of backups, you guys should check out (and maybe review) SyncBackSE (http://www.2brightsparks.com). This is the backup software I use on a daily basis and it works great. In addition, the developer is very active on their forums. Highly recommended!

[Gordo]

Thanks for the post. I have been diligent about backing up to an external hard drive, but lazy about getting it off to an optical disk. Once I upgraded to version 2, I gave a try. Now I can take the disk to work and have “off-site” backup.

[Mike Temporale]

While we're talking about backup.... I have a question regarding backing up as a whole (not just pictures).

HandyBackup has been mentioned around here a couple times. I was just checking out their website, but it doesn't list DVD as a supported media for backup. Does anyone know if this is an oversight? Backing up to CD is fine, but I would rather backup to DVD.

[Jason Dunn]

HandyBackup has been mentioned around here a couple times. I was just checking out their website, but it doesn't list DVD as a supported media for backup. Does anyone know if this is an oversight? Backing up to CD is fine, but I would rather backup to DVD.

AFAIK, there's no DVD backup option. I'm fighting with Handy Backup right now for an FTP backup, and it's pissing me off so I'm looking at other options. WinBackup looks pretty good.

EDIT: Ok, WinBackup sucks. It can do FTP, which I need, but it ONLY seems to back up into single-file globs. I need individual file backup with no compression.

[Mike Temporale]

Sucks. :evil:

I just searched Download.com and found these 2 reasonalbe sounding apps:

Genie Backup Manager Home Edition Version 5.0 (http://www.genie-soft.com/products/gbm/features.html)
Free to try, and $49.95 to buy

Simply Safe Backup 2005 (http://www.simplysafebackup.com/)
Personal Edition is Free (limited to 40,000 files per backup)

[Mike Temporale]

Alright, I just finished installing and testing both of these (without doing a restore) I would have to pick Genie's backup tool. The Simply Safe tool is nice, but I found it buggy and feature lacking compared to Genie. Features that Genie has over SS: Self Extracting backup, Auto Detect best location for scratch folder, Easy option to span multiple DVD's, Uses Sonic to burn, Easy on the Eye's, and it just plain worked.

I ran SS first, and it failed half way through because my drive ran out of space. It defaulted to the C Drive and didn't notice the 10 GB free on another drive. After this failed, SS would repeatedly say that there are no files to backup when I tried to run that job again. Even though I had picked Full Backup and not incremental, it seemed to think that there was nothing new to backup. After a couple reboots, I decided free wasn't worth it, and installed and tested Genie's tool.