Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

I've never had much success with Online Backup Services out there. This so called Web 2.0 services are plenty abound out in the internet space and each one of them are trying to carve a niche. I was contacted by the people at Protectmyphotos who gave me an Infinity plan to try out their online photo storage service. While their site sounds like it only takes in photos, they have added storage for documents and music too as of today  (but you'll need to set this up on the Preference tab when you login).

From their blog, I gather their founder, Cliff concocted the idea of this website in Christmas 2004. They said : "no one had an end-all solution to how to keep these photos safe from destruction." and noticed people were not willing to pay for premium services on Xdrive.

From the Protectmyphotos site, their Yearly Plan for Unlimited digital photo storage that provides 1-year of uninterrupted service is at an affordable $49.95 /year ($4.16 per month). Now that's cheap since they also store documents, music files, videos instead of photos only.

Here’s the steps I took to start using Protectmyphotos :

1.      Sign up here with your email address and password

2.      Download their software - ProtectMyPhotosSetup.exe that’s about 2.4 MB in size

3.      Install ProtectMyPhotosSetup.exe and login.

4.      Manually choose the folder that stores your photos or let the software automatically search for it.

5.      Leave the software running and it will show the uploading status in percentage. That was pretty easy.

6.       You can also restore photos by clicking the option on the software but it will open your internet browser and prompt for a login first.

Some other features of Protectmyphotos:

1. Automatic Discovery that automatically scans your hard drive looking for photos and then syncs them to our datacenter. NO more manual searches.

2. Stores video clips up to 100 megabytes for formats like AVI, ASF, MPEG, MPG, MOV, and WMV files!

3. They have a Mobile Viewer that's almost ready. It allows you to show off your photos to friends and colleagues via your mobile phones.

4. Their software detects and prevents duplicate photos from being uploaded.

Affordable and user-friendly, ProtectMyPhotos requires virtually no maintenance following the initial brief installation. Consumers download a small application with a one-time wizard-based setup that automatically and continuously synchronizes all full-resolution digital photos to at least two secure datacenters where they will be stored forever. You are immediately shielded from crashes, viruses, fires, floods, and human error. ProtectMyPhotos also offers virtually unlimited off-site photo storage, enough space for nearly 25,000 photos per user.  Entire photo collections are then available to view, share, and restore from anywhere. We've listened to your feedback!  You can now optionally go into your My Account preferences and set ProtectMyPhotos to also back up all your documents and music (including financial documents, which is a separate option). There's no charge for this cool new feature!