SAVING YOUR PHOTOS GETS EASIER

Our computers encourage the packrat in us. Depending on how bad we have it, most of us have at least a drawer, a closet or a room (if you've got it bad) in which we toss stuff that we just can't bring ourselves to throw away. And while the physical space where we save these items eventually defines how much we can keep, it's a little bit different when it comes to keeping things on the computer. With the cost of hard drives coming down to pennies per megabyte and terabyte drives becoming commonplace, we can be somewhat cavalier when it comes to keeping our digital clutter. The files we download, the music we listen to, the videos we watch, the programs we collect eventually become stale and even obsolete but we still keep them stored just in case someday we might want them again. And if we lose them, it's no big deal because you can probably find most of it online somewhere. But there's one category of data that transcends the others and that's our collections of photographs.

The pictures we take with our digital cameras are unique, making them invaluable, irreplaceable and priceless. Even the casual digital shutterbug usually winds up with hundreds, even thousands of digital images in a year or two. We entrust our computer's hard drive to store these images and therein lies the rub. It's a given that eventually a hard disk drive is going to malfunction. Knowing that, you would think we'd offload them to some other media to insure their safety. Yet so many don't do it for a variety of reasons. It seems like the most common of these are not knowing where the images are stored and just not knowing how to back up all of them. And even if you do know how and where they all are, the job of backing all of them up can be just too daunting. Over time, the digital images can become scattered throughout the hard drive and the job of finding them, organizing them and transferring them can be just too much. Fortunately for everyone however, Verbatim has come up with a very clever and easy solution.

Verbatim's PhotoSave DVD is a special recordable disc that features special software on it that's designed to launch automatically when inserted into a computer's DVD drive. Just pop the disc in and the PhotoSave software begins to scan the computer's hard drive for any and all digital pictures. Currently the PhotoSave software can identify over 80 different types of photo and video files. Once the PhotoSave DVD locates everything, it automatically burns all of the images it finds directly to the same DVD! For most cases, you just load in the DVD, click the AutoCopy button and let the PhotoSave DVD do its thing.

The PhotoSave DVD has around 4.5 gigabytes of storage which translates into around 2,000 photos with an average size of 2 megabytes. If the DVD determines that you have more images than can fit on one disc, the program lets you know before the process begins and tells you how many of the PhotoSave DVDs it will need to complete the backup process. When a disc fills, the program will prompt you to insert the next disc and continues until every image is copied. When the AutoCopy mode is finished, the disc is closed and no more images can be saved to it. For most, this is the ideal way to backup everything. Just pop in the PhotoSave disc, click the AutoSave button and pop out the disc when it's all saved. It couldn't be more easy.

There's also a Camera/Memory copy mode that will automatically back up images stored on a digital camera that's connected to the computer at that time or to its memory card that's inserted into the computer's memory card reader. A third ManualCopy mode lets you further refine the search to specific folders, even specific files. Both of these modes leave the disc's session open so you can continue to add more photos to the same PhotoSave disc to it until its capacity is filled.

So no more excuses when it comes to backing up your photos. Just pop in a PhotoSave DVD and watch your memories last a lifetime and beyond.

Verbatim's PhotoSave DVD comes in a three ($9.99) or five ($14.99) pack, each disc enclosed in its own slim case. The PhotoSave DVD works only with Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

www.verbatim.com

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