NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, November 2008
Verbatim PhotoSave DVD – Backup Photos and Movies to DVD
By Ira Wilsker, APCUG Director;
Columnist, The Examiner, Beaumont, TX; Radio & TV Show Host

Iwilsker@apcug.net
(click to email author)

WEBSITES:
http://www.verbatim.com/photosave
http://www.verbatim.com/photosave/faq.cfm

In the past year, two of my daughters were married. Between the two weddings, I have accumulated hundreds of wedding photos, and hours of wedding videos. In the event of a natural disaster, such as our recent Hurricane Ike, or even a common hard drive failure, it would be an utter shame if those precious memories were lost. Over the years, I have repeatedly mentioned the need for frequent backups of critical data files, and photos and digital movies definitely qualify as critical data files. As I have written previously, when we evacuated for Hurricanes Rita, Gustav, and Ike, the first thing that I packed was my external hard drive, which had a current backup of my data files made with NTI's Shadow software. Being more the romantic, the first thing my wife packed was our wedding album, and the albums containing the kids’ baby pictures; these albums filled a large carton.

Nowadays, the majority of photos and home videos are digital, and stored on some type of digital media, such as a hard drive, flash drive, or CD disc. One reason why many do not have contemporary backups of all of their photos and videos is the effort to create the backups from multiple media types and formats, and the lack of software to automate the backup process. While there are many digital backup utilities available, Verbatim recently released what may arguably be the least expensive, easiest to use, and most comprehensive system to easily backup digital media; this new product is Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVD.

One of the factors that makes the PhotoSave DVD attractive is that there is no software to install on the computer, and no special software is needed to copy and burn the digital photos and movies to the PhotoSave DVD. All of the necessary software is included on each DVD, and runs automatically when the DVD is loaded into the DVD drive. The software is so simple and intuitive to use, that no experience or skill in burning DVDs is necessary, and the computer novice can copy and backup digital images and video to the DVD with ease. Verbatim digital media has an excellent reputation for durability and long life, and provides a reasonably safe place to store digital content for many years. Each Verbatim PhotoSave DVD has about 4.5 gigabytes of available storage space, and will hold about 2000 digital photos averaging about 2mb each. Using these DVDs as an automated digital image backup media is very cost effective, as a three pack of DVDs, which will hold a combined 6000 images (2mb each), is under $10, and a five pack (about 10,000 images) is under $15. At that price, and along with the simplicity and ease of use, there is no reason why anyone with digital images should not have a backup of their precious and irreplaceable images and videos. It is considered good computing practice to have multiple backups of critical files, such as photos and videos, and PhotoSave DVDs offer that opportunity at a most economical price.

Remember that hard drives do fail, and solid state media such as flash drives can also fail or be lost. None of us are immune to natural disasters, fires, or other maladies that can forever cost us our digital memories. Having backup copies of these images on long-lived media that can be played and viewed on almost any computer may protect us from a sad loss of valuable memories.

The DVD, in its jewel case, is in a physical form that can be easily slipped into a suitcase or purse. The images can be viewed from the DVD using Windows integral Windows Explorer or any other image viewer or editor.

Using the PhotoSave DVD is an effortless process. The DVD is simply inserted into a writeable DVD drive that supports the DVD-R format, and will automatically open and run on any computer with Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. Since the software is on the DVD, and not installed on the computer, there is nothing to install. Once the software opens, the user has two choices; automatic mode and manual mode. In automatic mode, the user need only to click on the “Record” button, and the software will search the PC for the common image format “JPEG” (.jpg, .jpeg, .jp2 and .jpe), and automatically burn all of the images to the DVD. For those who want to save additional image and video formats, or manually control the process, a manual mode is available. In manual mode, PhotoSave can search and copy to DVD almost all current image and video formats in use, including 43 different formats of images, and 53 formats of videos. These same 96 formats can be searched using the third option, “Camera/Memory Copy” which will search any camera, or camera based storage attached to the PC, and burn the images or videos directly to the DVD. If the user has a massive collection of images and videos that exceeds the 4.5 gb capacity of a single PhotoSave DVD, the user may either use an additional DVD, or choose to seamlessly span the data between DVD discs. This is especially useful in backing up large movie files.

Since almost all currently manufactured PCs support burning DVD-R discs, and Verbatim has made PhotoSave DVDs so inexpensive and easy to use, there is now no reason why users should not have up-to-date backups of all of their digital photos and movies. It is sad when people lose their irreplaceable digital photos and movies for any reason. By using Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVDs to effortlessly backup those images and videos, much grief can be avoided.

Always remember that the three most important words in computing are backup, backup, and backup. PhotoSave performs that task in an admirable way.

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