When you live fulltime in an RV, like we do, life is a little different. Instead of generally routine days and one memorable vacation, we have no routine, and can’t remember half of the places we’ve been! I need my pictures to remind me about the places we’ve been and things we’ve done. I look thru our Blog, or peruse my photos on Picasa Web Albums and say to myself, “Wow, what a life!”
Here’s a 2 ½ minute slide show movie, “Geeks on Tour 2008 in Review”, created with Picasa:
I would be devastated if I lost those pictures, so I back them up to CD/DVD each and every month. Now that the year is over, I’m going to back up the entire year and take the DVDs over to my Mother’s house for safe keeping. Picasa makes this very easy:
- Tools, Backup Pictures
- Click ‘New Set’ give it a name of 2008
- Check the box next to every folder of pictures in 2008 (that’s easy for me because I store all my pictures in folders by month)
- Picasa reports that I’ve selected 4,347 files and I’ll need 18 CDs or 3 DVDs. I choose DVDs ( I use the DVD-R type)
- Put a DVD in the drive and click ‘Burn’
- Wait until it completes that DVD. It will spit it out and display a message requesting the second DVD. Then it repeats for the third.
- When it’s all completed, label the disks with a Sharpie marker then take the disks to another computer to test them. There’s nothing worse than thinking you have good backups and finding out much later (when you need them) that they didn’t process correctly. When you first put them in the drive, you should be prompted to do a Restore. You don’t want to restore, you just want to look and see that the pictures are there, so cancel the restore prompt. What you want to do is ‘Explore’ or ‘Open Folder to View Files.’ If you see that option, just choose it. If not, you can go to My Computer and right click on the DVD drive, then choose Explore. You should see a folder called $My Pictures. That’s where all your photos are.
Do it! Do it now!
Chris Guld