Digital Home Thoughts: Picasa 2.0 Makes Photo Backup a Breeze, So Back Up Your Photos!

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 all 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 very 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. ;-)

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.



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.

Picasa is a fantastic tool for backing up your photos, so if you haven't done so already, download Picasa, grab a few blank CDs or DVDs, and back up your photos...before something happens to make you wish you had.