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4:57 pm

July 14, 2017

While reviewing some of your prior tutorials/newsletters, I found one (actually several) where you emphasized backing up computers/photos/etc. Well, this laptop of mine is soon to be 3 years old and the only thing I back up on it is my Quicken program using their cloud.
I was never a good backup person and would like to know what you now recommend to use for backing up things, photos in particular. Not in a cloud but on something tangible. I found VERY OLD recommendations on here about Click-free backup and also Karen’s Replicator – one was with a USB drive and I forget how the other one worked. Do you still recommend them? TechnoRV no longer sells the Click-free one, doesn’t seem to be available even on Amazon.
Slightly different topic you recommend is that people need to understand file structures, knowledge needed especially when choosing what/how to back up. I kinda understand but never really deal with it, so I think I need to focus on that also, especially since I will want to start backing up photos.
Thanks for providing so much info for us regarding our precious photos and TIA to helping me out/pointing me in right direction regarding the two above topics.
Hey Rosemary,
I’m so glad episode 135 helped! And, yes, USB drives (especially the big ones, not the thumb drives) are the preferred way to make physical backups of stuff on your computer. (cloud backups are easier because they’re completely automated) The ClickFree was only different because it had software that ran backups automatically. Windows has features that backup automatically as well.
As for photos, I think ALL photos should be in your Google Photos cloud account. The photos from your phone go there automatically. To get the photos from your computer, watch Button Show episode 132: Google PHotos for Picasa Users? Specifically – I demonstrate the different ways of uploading from computer to GP at the 36 minute point.
Here are the videos to watch for that:
My photo workflow is:
- All photos taken with phone/tablet/camera get uploaded to Google Photos
- All photos taken with phone ALSO get uploaded to a second cloud storage – OneDrive (or Dropbox or iCloud)
- Every month I create a Google Photos album for my best pictures and I download that to an external hard drive for my local backup.
Hope that helps
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