I am a backup fiend, and incurably paranoid. I ghost my hard drive once every month, and have three images of it: one on a portable hard drive in our barn; one on a portable hard drive in my fireproof safe in the house; and one on the second drive of my computer. In between times, I made dvd backups of recent data additions, usually about once a week.
And yesterday I plopped down $50 for a year of Carbonite, and online backup service. Unlimited storage space and very simple. You tell it what folders to back up, and it does it, and when things change, it backs that up. Automatically. You have a folder you want added to the backups, you right-click it and select “Carbonite” from the context menu and tell it to add that folder to the backups.

What is the catch, you ask??? Only one!! The initial backup, for me at least, will take about 10 days!! That’s right campers. I have about 42 gb of data to be backed up, and it has been going for 24 hours now and has done 6%!!!!! The backup rate is partially based on how much I am using the internet. For example, tomorrow and Saturday, when I am at work, it will get more done. I hope.

The good news is that when the initial back up is done, the incremental ones will not take nearly as long.

Anyway, I hope this is definitely worth the $4 bucks a month or so it is costing me.

I have used ACDSee for many years, paying every so often to upgrade it. I have no idea why I have been doing this, as it is always slow, has often crashed on me, and for a long time, when I deleted the folder that it expected to open up to, it didn’t even work. Well last night I wanted to print some pictures, so when I hit print, ACDSee shut down in stead.
So I immediately went online and found Picasa 3. I had tried Picasa ages ago when it first came out and was unimpressed. I installed it last night and now I am very happy. It is very simple, and really what I am looking for, and I like the way you can view stuff by their supposed date or by their location in the tree.
So ACDSee has been uninstalled.

I find myself, more and more, moving towards Open Source and otherwise free software. I have Open Office on my laptop. I have used Blender to create the “Billy Elliot, the Box” video, along with Audacity and other free and open source software to complete it. Most of the free and open source stuff I have used has been great.