Newbie questions

[BAD]

I'm a new user on a 14-day trail and I'm trying to understand how to get the most out of SmugMug. I would be using SmugMug to post travel photos for friends and relatives. Also would like to backup all of my photos on line. I have a few basic questions that don't seem to be covered in the help files I've seen.

Since I'm interested in backing up my photos online with SmugMug, I've uploaded one small gallery (36 pics) from PS Elements 6.0. It was pretty slow even using my cable connection. I can't imagine loading all my photos that way. My jpg files run about 3-4 kb. I have over 20,000 pics to backup.

Am I correct in thinking only photos I upload to a gallery on SmugMug are backed up? So I would have to upload all my pics to my galleries and then they are automatically backed up for me.

If I were traveling could I upload my jpgs from my laptop to SmugMug and then download them from SmugMug to my home computer when I return home?

How do you restore photos from SmugMug to your home computer in the event you lost all your home computer files?

I'd be interested in storage prodocols from other SmugMug users.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks,

Barbara

[denisegoldberg]

Barbara -
Welcome to dgrin & to smugmug!

You're right, all files you upload to smugmug (and they must be .jpg files) are backed up. In fact, they are stored in multiple locations. So yes, SmugMug does serve as a good off-site backup for you. That said, you may or may not decide to upload all of your photos. I only upload those photos that I want to publish. I have many others not in my smugmug galleries. You could upload photos that you don't intend for public consumption into separate galleries that are marked as private, or you could just upload all of them to public galleries. Your choice.

As far as upload speed goes... you might try one of the other smugmug uploaders to see if it's faster than the one that you used. You should also be aware that many (most?) of the internet providers have upload speeds set so they are much slower than download speeds. No matter what you choose, it's going to take a while to upload 20,000 photos. The good news is, you'll only need to do it once!

You can easily pull them back to your computer using AlbumFetcher, available at http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47160.

So yes, you could certainly upload photos to smugmug while you are traveling and then pull them down to your home computer later.

As far as offsite backups go, I use Amazon S3 to backup all of my computer files, not just photos. There are other tools out there too, all with different prices and capabilities. I'd recommend doing a search for the word backup in the Wide Angle section of the dgrin forum. You'll see many backup options discussed there. Just a heads up - upload speeds with these tools are also slow. If I remember correctly it probably took me two weeks to upload all of my files to S3. But now I just upload changed files, so the time to upload is much faster.

--- Denise

Added later... also, SmugMug will create a backup CD/DVD for you on request. Price is based on the size of your files. See http://www.smugmug.com/help/backups.