Having an online photo backup is something that is really important for anyone that uses a digital camera and then stores the pictures on their computer.
When I deal with people and computers, I'm often shocked to learn that although almost everyone owns a digital camera, almost now one is backing up these memories.
From a restoring point of view, when people bring me a drive to restore, it's terrible news when I have to tell someone that the pictures they've been taking for the last 5-8 years are not recoverable unless they want to send them to a forensic lab.
Many people find themselves with a multiple stack of folders and directories to manage the files your build up over time.
You don't need to do an online backup, it is however a method of choice for ease of use and you know your information is safe.
You pay a monthly fee, run a small backup program on your computer, and you let someone else worry about making sure that your pictures or data are always ready and willing to work for you.
What really gets me is preventing a loss of this information is so easy it shocks me to learn not many people do a backup.
It used to be common place to print your digital pictures because it was the only way you could view your photographs.
Now, the only way to see a copy of your picture is to first choose which one you want, then send it to a lab or print it out.
Since this step is often missed because digital photographs look so good on the computer monitor, I urge everyone to do a backup.
You can also use a method of information redundancy, that is copying your own information across multiple hard drives, or even putting your photos on your computer as well as a portable drive of some sort.
Although this works, in the event of a natural disaster, like your house getting flooded, you still lose everything.
A house fire, break in etc still don't leave your protected.
In the end, this is better security, but it still leaves a gap which has the potential for problems.
Once your backup has finished the first time, the program I like to use is great, it will run in the background of your computer, and will backup automatically keeping your data safe, but the best part, it's going to do this for you when you walk away, and your computer is unused for a certain amount of time.
Even better yet, it has a free open trial option.
This piece of software is great for pictures, but, unless you have a really fast internet connection, as of today, I don't recommend it as a whole system backup.
So how long does it take? That's the easiest answer, but it's one you probably don't like.
It depends.
The faster your internet connection, the faster the upload will be.
It basically all comes back down to your internet service provider on this one.
Since all of them have so many different options it's very defendant on them.
For this reason, when you do your first backup, I recommend that you take and disable all but 100MB or so of data, just to get a feel for what kind of commitment you're in for.
Then after this backup is done, bite off what your system can chew in a night.
This way your computer is always available at full speed when you want to use it.
Remember, if it's important to you, always back it up, you never know when a computer drive is going to crash, they rarely give any kind of warning.
For more help you can visit online photo backup for the complete step by step.