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Online backup services like Mozy, Carbonite, etc. are some good & inexpensive choices for storing your photos, home videos, music files, personal documents and other important computer files on to a remote location. Amazon S3 too can be used for automatic backup via Jungle Disk.
The only problem with these web based services is that they aren’t really handy for storing very large amounts of data since all files for backup have to be transferred via the Internet first and that can be a serious bottleneck. For instance, it can take around 10 days to transfer 100GB of data over a T1 Internet connection.
Let Amazon Backup your Hard Disk
Imagine if you are a professional photographer or someone who frequently shoots video, chances are that you have stored all your life’s work on a couple of external hard drives but moving data from these local storage devices to a remote location over the web isn’t a practical option.
Now Amazon has a simple "offsite backup" solution for you in the form of AWS Import Export that doesn’t even require you to have a fast Internet connection.
You just have to ship your physical hard drive to Amazon via snail mail, they will upload data from the drive onto their servers and will then return the drive to you via snail mail again. Once the files are uploaded onto the Amazon cloud, you should be able to access them from any S3 client.
If you are using Picasa Web Albums to store your photographs but don’t have the Picasa desktop software to download those images back to the hard drive, here’s a simple trick that will help you download original (full size) pictures from any of your Picasa Albums without requiring the Picasa application.Step 1: Open Picasa Utility and sign-in with your Google Account* – use the same credentials that you use for logging into your Picasa account.
*Picasa Web Utility is a Google App Engine powered application so your Google password won’t be shared with the developer.
Step 2: Once you have authorized Picasa Web Utility to access your photos, it will show a list of all your existing Picasa Album. Select any album that you want to download locally.
Step 3: Under options, choose “Original Photo Size” and click Generate Codes. Picasa Web Utility will now create direct download links to all photos in that Picasa Web Album.
Open notepad, copy-paste those Picasa links here and save the text file with a .html extension. Now open this HTML file into any web browser and choose Save As -> entire page. This will download all the Picassa images to your hard drive.
Picasa Web Utility has other applications as well. For instance, you may generate HTML codes for thumbnails and create an instant photo gallery for publishing on a blog.