wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to recognize them? Yes, of course. The simpler solution? Put a different name on each drive, each memory card, each USB thumb drive, but this is very small step. We know that graphical interfaces work better. Why not replace all these ugly grey icons with something ore meaningful (and more pleasant)?

A simple process

The only requirements are:

• Access to Google image search (but you can use another one, of course)
• Use of a simple image editor able to save to “Windows .ICO” file format – I use IrfanView which is very feature-rich, but simple to use and perfectly free (as in free beer).

Step-by-step process:

1. Define an image which is representing the drive well,
2. Collect this picture,
3. Set it to the right format,
4. Set it up on the USB drive.

Step by step

Define the image for your icon

I recommend several possible and complementary approaches. Keep in mind that the objective is to easily recognize the USB thumb drives or the disk drives connected to the computer USB port(s). Nota bene: This works with internal hard drives too.

Solution #1: If the USB thumb drive is very recognizable, you can find on the web some good photo representing it nice and well. You can even collect a press release photo form the manufacturer if you have the manufacturer name and the product model. For example, I can look for photos of external hard drives from Western Digital, MyPassport model, red color. Google result is offering a wide choice of good pictures:

It works very well with memory cards. Plenty of good pictures from Sandisk, Lexus, and other manufacturers.

Even if you don’t have the exact name of the thumb drive (not all of Chinese-sourced drives are named properly), it is quite easy to look for a good description like “orange USB drive”. Less precise, somewhat more error-prone, but it works astonishingly well.

Solution #2: With the same Google Image Search, look for a nice photo that would represent the disk contents (or its name). Try looking for “photography” or “black and white photography” or even the name of a famous photographer (I tried with “Man Ray”, “Helmut Newton” who have very symbolic images to offer) for a hard drive to hold your photo archives.

Choice reduction

In front of so many options, I recommend intelligently reducing choice with some specific search filters. (on the Google page, press the “Tools” button and choose the following filters):

1. Only take large size images (you’ll see it is important)
2. Select public domain pictures that you can modify: “Labeled for re-use with modification” (Why steal a photo? What good photographer would steal the photo of another one? Use a freely available one).
3. Most critical: Chose a very simple, pretty but easily recognizable picture (an icon may be very small).
4. Last recommendation: It is often better to start from an image with a white or very lightly colored background (it “works” better in most cases, as you will see).

Collect the picture

Download the image from Google.

Create the icon

After all, an icon is merely a square image brought down to a small size and in special ICO format. the walkthrough is rather simple, you’ll see.

Load the image into the IrfanView application.

Modify the size of the picture to move to a square ratio (change canvas size). You can do it by either enlarging or reducing the canvas size (choosing the right background color).

The result should be a nice square picture but you may feel that it is rather large for an icon.

As a matter of fact, size does not matter much here. The larger, the better to keep the icon looking good when changing display sizes. Now comes the time to make sure that the size is exactly a multiple of 2 (eg. 2048×2048 pixels). It is not useful to go further than 4096×4096 pixels, but do not go below 1024×1024 pixels. IrfanView will do this easily, from Image>Resize/resample... menu.

Then, you need to save the picture as .ICO file (be sure to use “Save as type” with the “ICO – Windows icon” option).

Setup on the USB drive

This icon (this ICO file) must be saved at the root of the USB thumb drive (in the  D:\ directory), preferably under the autorun.ico name (but we can accommodate any other name like Lynx.ico).

Last, copy or create a text file named autorun.inf with the following contents (also in D:\ directory), :

[autorun]
ICON="autorun.ico"


This small file will allow Windows finding the icon named autorun.ico (or any other name that you previously chose)).

One comment about memory cards: You can do the same for your SD or CF Flash memory cards. Just remember that this will disappear any time you format the card in the camera. Have a copy handy to put it back on the Flash card.

Result

After that, your icons will be perfectly distinguishable. Only empty slots are exhibiting the default ugly non-images. All the rest is animal pictures, photographs from major artisits (Doisneau and Man Ray), pictures of the thumb drive actually used, etc.

Bonus: This is applicable to your company logo (see the example above). If you give USB thumb drives away, better than putting any photo, install your company logo for a fully personalized thumb drive! If you are a wedding photographer selling digital photos on a USB thumb drive, this is a minor improvement to have the drive look more professional than ever.

With Darktable, like with Lightroom, you can organize, store, visualize. But you also can modify/edit your photo pictures (in RAW as in JPEG), including in a non-destructive way.

It’s worth trying by yourself (with this kind of price, there is no downside).

• Download Darktable (in English).
• Download Darktable (en français).

It’s been years that I was tracking this product with great care. Here is the best photo news of 2017 (it will compensate the worst one from Adobe Lightroom).

Sometimes, people will remember that GIMP is a program allowing to do digital photography on Linux. And, often, many people think that it is only available on this relatively uncommon platform. But, as a matter of fact, GIMP also exists on Windows. And, because of its price but also because of its features, it is recommended to at least try this Windows software.

The big news of this version 2.8 is the arrival of what its developers designate with the ugly name of single-window interface, which is actually a presentation based on a free window along with tools palettes.

This version is also able to handle layers (individually or as a group), to work on 16-bit or 32-bit pictures, but it’s the more discreet improvements that may be the most critical for user comfort and efficiency. Things like:

• The use of the Cairo library (which gives a much improved rendering of texts and graphics)
• The use of independent processes for save and export operations (which offer a much faster feeling for these long operations)
• Direct editing of text strings (rather than the editing in a separate window, for better Wysiwyg)
• The nicer design of many little tools like spin buttons and many controls

So, if you are not fully convinced by the small fortunes that Adobe is requiring from the customers at each new version, it is now time to upgrade your mind and check GIMP.

To get even more:

• All GIMP-related posts
• Download (freely) GIMP v2.8.0

• Windows Explorer (thumbs and gallery)
• Windows Live Photo Gallery

The new Microsoft codec brings new compatibility with the following impressive list of cameras:

• Canon: EOS 1000D (EOS Kiss F in Japan and the EOS Rebel XS in North America), EOS 10D, EOS 1D Mk2, EOS 1D Mk3, EOS 1D Mk4, EOS 1D Mk2 N, EOS 1Ds Mk2, EOS 1Ds Mk3, EOS 20D, EOS 300D (the Kiss Digital in Japan and the Digital Rebel in North America) , EOS 30D, EOS 350D (the Canon EOS Kiss Digital N in Japan and EOS Digital Rebel XT in North America), EOS 400D (the Kiss Digital X in Japan and the Digital Rebel XTi in North America), EOS 40D, EOS 450D (EOS Kiss X2 in Japan and the EOS Rebel XSi in North America), EOS 500D (EOS Kiss X3 in Japan and the EOS Rebel T1i in North America), EOS 550D (EOS Kiss X4 in Japan, and as the EOS Rebel T2i in North America), EOS 50D, EOS 5D, EOS 5D Mk2, EOS 7D, EOS D30, EOS D60, G2, G3, G5, G6, G9, G10, G11, Pro1, S90
• Nikon: D100, D1H, D200, D2H, D2Hs, D2X, D2Xs, D3, D3s, D300, D3000, D300s, D3X, D40, D40x, D50, D5000, D60, D70, D700, D70s, D80, D90, P6000
• Sony: A100, A200, A230, A300, A330, A350, A380, A700, A850, A900, DSC-R1
• Olympus: C7070, C8080, E1, E10, E20, E3, E30, E300, E330, E400, E410, E420, E450, E500, E510, E520, E620, EP1
• Pentax (PEF formats only): K100D, K100D Super, K10D, K110D, K200D, K20D, K7, K-x, *ist D, *ist DL, *ist DS
• Leica: Digilux 3, D-LUX4, M8, M9
• Minolta: DiMage A1, DiMage A2, Maxxum 7D (Dynax 7D in Europe, α-7 Digital in Japan)
• Epson: RD1
• Panasonic: G1, GH1, GF1, LX3

If you want to download immediately the English version of the codec pack, just go to the special Microsoft download web site: Microsoft Camera Codec Pack (16.0.0652.0621).

photo credit: Photo Extremist

How old is your last backup?

Check our articles about the photographer’s backup.

1. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)
2. Local backup options (Optical discs (CD/DVD), RAID drives). Interim conclusion is “No local storage“
3. Online backup options (Photo web sites, Friend-to-Friend)
4. Online backup options (Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites, web storage options, software for online storage) and conclusions

It is most visible when shooting long exposures and the strategy used by most photo cameras is simply to shoot an additional black picture(without opening the shutter) just after the photo you wanted to find the hot pixels and remove/subtract them from the original photo. This is observable as a relatively long computation after a long exposure photo.

Sample kindly provided by Dan Thorberg.

It takes time in the field and it uses up the camera electrical energy. So, here is a small tool that allow to transfer this operation toward the studio PC: PixelFixer.

The list of photo cameras this tool is compatible with contains a lot of cameras from Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Leica. No Sony I know of (they are left with the in-camera option that works well too).

Téléchargement gratuit de PixelFixer.

The EXIF data hold a lot of useful technical information about your photos. One of these is the date and hour of the snapshot. This is quite pleasant, useful and nice up to the moment when your camera internal clock fails or starts lagging. Or when you need very precise synchronization with another device (like a GPS geo-marker, for example). Here, you need to correct precisely the hour (or worse, the date) written in your photos and -generally- you have to do it on dozens of photos at once.

How to do this? Under Windows, ask to EXIF Date Changer from Relik Software. This utility program will allow to correct this information in a matter of seconds.

1. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)
2. Local backup options (Optical discs (CD/DVD), RAID drives). Interim conclusion is “No local storage“
3. Online backup options (Photo web sites, Friend-to-Friend)
4. Online backup options (Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites, web storage options, software for online storage) and conclusions

So, we started to describe online solutions. Let’s see the most serious and most extensive approaches to online storage.

Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites

Many web sites are now offering services that may be exactly what you need: You send them data files they keep them for you. The most interesting ones include a backup utility which will automatically transfer files in the background.

Now, the big difference (with the previous options) is that you get a fully integrated service. Exactly what most people are looking for: Fire and forget… until you need to restore.

An important feature of nearly all of these services is that they offer a first level of service for free: A few GB of storage without a credit card. But they have a business model relying on some of the biggest users paying a rent on the disk space.

Some of them (like LiveMesh, Live Sync or Syncplicity) include the possibility to synchronize between computers (if you have more than one computer, it is a good way to ensure that the office and home computers have a copy of the same files). This could come handy to the photographer who is traveling with her laptop and is not sure of copying everything back and forth between the laptop and the desktop.

Some services may look interesting but are unusable in backup mode because this function is left to the responsibility (and the hard work) of the user: SkyDrive (despite its 25GB free storage space) and MobileMe fall in this category; They go in the right direction but stop short of it.

Let’s compare some of the best offers on the market.

Of course, these are not the only ones and the readers may offer some additional advice in the comments. You are welcome.

Special recommendations for online backup (or any other backup)

1. Always try and restore a few files to confirm that your setup is correct (it’s not enough to have the service telling you that it’s alright);
2. Check regularly that you did not stop the backup service (it happened to me recently: I wanted to do a test and I forgot to re-start my Mozy backup, for more than a week).
3. Check that the space you rent is sufficient and that you are not nearing the limit. You don’t want to hit the limit while in the middle of an important assignment. And it would be the worst to be -temporarily- unprotected.
4. Notice that the initial backup may be very long. It is not unusual to wait backup 2GB per day. So, the first backup may take days. The next ones will be depending only on what new/modified files must be sent to the server.

The web storage options

Now, there is also a pretty easy option that can be applied. All in all, what you need is a bunch of disk space available for you to store files. This is exactly what most web services provide to people willing to create a web site, except that you will have a size request much larger than most web sites. Instead of 1GB of space, you will need 1TB of disk space.

Pure online storage

Some web hosting companies actually include this possibility. There is usually a cost because they include the cost of serving that data (what you will mostly not use: Once backed up into the web store, you’ll only access to check or to restore). So, you can go and find a web hosting company. For reasonable needs like those of many amateur photographers, nearly any host service will be OK. For example, OVH (the hosting service for my web sites, currently) has a plan for a small server with storage extensible up to 1000GB (RPS_I) for 9.99€ (ex-VAT) plus 2€ per 10GB slice added. It will add up: for 500GB, you would pay 110€ per month. Or you can get a dedicated server (a bit more complicated to setup) with 4x 1500 GB of RAID drives for 89€ per month.

If you want something even bigger and with a much larger upgrade path, you still can ask Amazon. The large bookstore is also reselling part of its networked storage through the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s priced flexibly and they have essentially no limit to what they can provide. Of course, prices are not always cheap, but it’s hard to beat them.

You can test your own options with their online calculator.

ADrive is also an option here. It offers 50GB of free storage, for individual use, but the Premium offer goes up to 1000GB. But the web interface has been improved, even if the file uploader still requires Java.
If you sign up for a paid account, ADrive is offers advanced features like FTP access (needed here, see below), a larger number of concurrent downloads (for faster restore), SSL encryption, and a desktop client for Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

Software for online storage

In both these cases, all you need is a way to download data back in case of a crash (essentially nearly all web browsers could do this, but an FTP program will be OK too) and upload data as simply as possible. I recommend using some powerful FTP software program like FLING.

Fling is entirely free, like most of its competitors. And, as I quote from their web site: “Fling is software to help you automate uploading or transferring files. It is typically used to maintain a web site on a remote hosted server or to automate backup of folders. The software supports both file transfer protocol (FTP) and [local] network file transfer.” Exactly what we need here!

One last comment here: It has been said repetitively that Google is preparing a similar offer under the name of Google G-Drive. Nothing exists yet, but it could well be a similar offer starting with a completely free entry point. But this is only a rumor for now.

Conclusions

Which one is for you? I can’t decide if you don’t tell me what kind of photographer you are. But if you are one of the normalized photographers I described, it’s relatively easy.

• The Digital Granddad will most probably go for the External Hard drive (probably along with some Flickr or RedBubble account.
• The Expert has already decided to go the Mozy way.
• I recommend the Pro to check an online solution with FLING.

You’ll have to read the article to be sure in which category you fall, of course. But remember that digital data is flimsy. In a moment, all of your pictures may be gone. Do you really want to try your luck?

These all have the advantage of protecting your backup against one aspect of risk management: There is no longer a risk of seeing a local accident corrupting all of your backup data. No fire, no earthquake can take down both your photos and your backup files. You put the backup on the network, and it is located in some distant location (often with its own integrated company-level backup solution, too: A backup of your backup). So, it’s fairly safe.

On-line backup options

Photo web sites

Right! It may be like an obvious option, but it’s not always a bad one. If you put all your photos on Flickr, not only can you share your images with the rest of the world (or the rest of the family), but you immediately have a copy of your pictures in a server farm at the other end of the world. And, while it may not be easy, you can definitely get them back in case of a too-fast delete or disk crash on your computer.

Of course, there are many options. Those I can think immediately about are:

• MyPhotoAlbum
• Flickr
• PBase

Pick your own.

Obviously OK for small quantities of pictures. But also consider the long time it would take to collect images one by one in case of a computer crash. Tedious is a word coming to mind and it is a clear understatement.

Friend-to-Friend

There is an interesting development to the availability of fast Internet connections: P2P or Peer-to-Peer data exchange. While it is usually associated to music and video files being exchanged between young people and older pirates, there is a surprising extension being seen.

What some people call Friend-to-Friend (or F2F) allows a group of friends (or associates of some kinds) to share some data. Nobody outside your group can see what is happening, but it can be used for distant backup. Let’s suppose you don’t really have an issue with disk space. Why not let your friends backup their data on your disk while you backup your data on theirs?

This is as simple as it comes. Of course, technically, it’s a bit more complex, but it works well. Some software programs like the following, ease that approach with a fully packaged solution:

• Crashplan offers more traditional backup option (see below), but it’s most interesting option is F2F with a friend’s computer, a remote server you rent, etc. Of course, it includes some encryption to ensure that your friend’s do not know what your files are, and its interface is plain simple. CrashPlan is freeware available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Cucku works on Windows only. It allows to send encrypted (with 256-bit AES) backups to your friends computers. You’ll notice that it is well integrate in Skype to support part of the exchanges.
• With Zoogmo installed on your computer and your friends computers, you can search each other and send files back and forth. You set it up and it will send files around every two hours. It seems very simple and efficient. Zoogmo is a free download for Windows systems only, and requires a free sign-up.

This is very fine except that you need to use the drives of others. So, you need to get some fairly large available space on the computers of your friends or family. Usually, the reciprocating approach works well, but it means that you must have some level of confidence and a relatively similar interest in backing up each other data. That makes it OK for close friends, or photo clubs members/partners. It usually is less applicable to family links, but it is very interesting indeed: Your backup drive is bought for others while others buy their own backup drive for you…

[To be continued]

Let’s start with other local storage (we’ll keep online storage for later installments of this series).

Optical discs (CD/DVD)

photo credit: bobbigmac

Many people have been using DVDs (previously CD-Rs) to make copies of all their images.

This may look good: copying a bunch of files to a DVD-R is a simple matter and once done, it is pretty difficult to delete the files. You setup yourself for a little routine, and you keep a stack of plastic discs holding all your images in as many copies as you want.

This looks like security; This is not!

While we are repeated that CD life times are reaching a century (DVD life times are only a little shorter), this is only partially true. Let’s see some interesting details:

• Pressed CDs and DVDs have long life times, but this is not exactly the same for CD-R or DVD-R. These writable (or re-writable) discs do not try and claim such long life times.
• Official guaranteed life times can only be reached in the best storage situations: Heat and light are the enemies of optical drives. The manufacturers make their tests in conditions that are not often maintained in a house even with a good AC, like 15°C temperature and strictly no light during years.
• Manufacturing quality may have a considerable impact: From one product line to another, the actual life time may be divided by 2. No brand name is immune to these exceptions. The most expensive ones are not always the best.
• You thought that we were speaking of years? Think again. I had an (involuntary) experiment with several hundred CD-R from many brands, where I exposed them to French Summer temperatures. Within two years, 50% of the discs were no longer readable. That’s right merely two Summers were enough to kill half of all brands of CD-R in storage.
• Evaluating the status of a DVD-R is not easy: When there is one error on the disc, it is silently corrected by the optical drive. The first sign of a problem comes when you no longer can read a file (too late!) Some tools may help, but they are more useful to save the last remnants of data; I wouldn’t be ready to regularly check the status of more than a couple of plastic discs.

RAID drives

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It describes a way to associate several disc drives in a way that protects them against the failure of one of them. Suppose that a single disc drive suddenly fails, you loose the data right now. In a RAID, discs support each other and (in the right configuration) a single disc failure will be signaled by a message or a blinking light, but the RAID unit will still operate as a fully normal disc.

It is worth mentioning because it protects very efficiently against disc drive hardware failures. Several computer motherboard include the feature allowing to build such unit by merely connecting 3 to 5 normal discs and using a setup wizard. After a failure, you finish your work normally, remove the failed drive, replace it with a new one and forget about this bleep of an incident.

One important thing to remember: This is not replacing a backup because even a RAID drive unit will not protect you against the accidental deletion of a file. On the contrary, it will make sure that your accidental deletion is achieved in the safest way.

Additional recommendations

I can also invite to reading some useful complementary posts:

• Five Best Windows Backup Tools
• Five Best Free System Restore Tools (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

No local storage

It is now time for you to remember one important thing in terms of disaster management: Do not underestimate the seriousness of the circumstances that will lead to a loss of data. Rather common reasons to loose your data are fire and theft. If your backup hard drive is in the same room/house as your computer and a fire starts, not only will you loose your house and your computer, but your backup is gone as well. If a burglar enters your flat and leaves with computer hardware, you can be sure that he will take both the computer and the external drive sitting at its side.

Question to the Pro: Do you remember what happened to this photo colleague who lost all of his archives in an office fire a few years ago?

Any local storage is unsafe from this point of view. No hard disk, no DVD would be safe from the accidental fire. You still can ship your backup drive to your mom, but this becomes really cumbersome. In the next installment, we will look at backup solutions that include a storage located at some significant distance.

[To be continued]

If you need to resize a bunch of pictures (for example, before publishing them on the web), it is a pain in the neck to collect them all and play with the Photoshop commands. For Windows users, here is a utility program that does exactly this in a nice way: All files of a directory, with a lot of neat options.

Resize My Photos is freeware, for Windows. It even has a cool right-click menu for Windows Explorer integration.

Worth trying.

Any digital photographer is quickly confronted with the bane of computer memory. At first, you notice that you need a lot of DRAM memory to edit your pictures (using Photoshop for example). The solution is easily found: Add more memory (Here come 4 GB of DRAM!) Then, you discover that all those 20 MP pictures from your SLR photo camera take up a lot of disk space. No problemo! Let’s add an external disk drive like the one here on the right. And you get as much disk space as needed.

You shouldn’t loose a picture

Now, most people would stop here and forget about the next important (Critical!) step: Be ready to backup your photo.

A disk drive is a relatively safe place to store your image files. But it is not immune to the risk of physical or electronic breakdown. Just think about it a second. Don’t wait for the next disk crash.

Even if you are not a pro photographer (and it is is even worse if you are), you probably have a few thousand images lying around. Their individual monetary value may be low (that’s also true for most pros who rely on the sheer mass of their good work to produce regular income rather than on a small number of pictures) but quite a number of these images will be impossible to replace (think about images of the birth of your children, the last picture you took of your deceased parent, the photos you brought back from your unique travel to Patagonia, inner Mongolia, or Yellowstone National Park: Are you ready to loose them forever right now?).

It happened before. I am ready to bet that you lost at least a dozen pictures. It will happen again. Now that you are sensitized to this issue, what can you do? What is the best backup option?

What photographer am I?

I offer to cover a wide span of options to give a few recommendations. But I think that it is useful to differentiate my comments and recommendations depending on the type of photographer that you are. Here are the three user profiles I intend to advise depending on their approach to photography:

1. Very occasional photographer (“Digital granddad“): You came from the old analog world. You have a 10 MP entry-level SLR camera or a good point-and-shoot. Maybe you kept the old camera too, but the pictures are piling up: 2000 files totaling 20 GB. You have no problem to store these on your computer, you want security, but not the hassles of computer tools.
2. Continuous shooting amateur (“Expert“): You shoot a lot of pictures: Your children, your friends, your travels, some artsy pictures, etc. You are concerned that nearly none of these picture files could be replaced and they are already counting up in tens of thousands and 100 to 500 GB. You don’t earn money from these, so you can’t pay a lot. But you are ready to do a little tweaking to get the right solution.
3. Professional photographer (“Pro“): You earn money from your art. You nearly stopped counting the files you have: Hundreds of thousands of images, maybe a million already and more than a 1.000 GB of storage (local storage on your computer has already become a nightmare and you use several hard drives; And this is not slowing down). You don’t have more time to spend on setting up networks, drives, programs, but you may be renting a reasonable solution. If it is 100% reliable.

If you want to know, I am one happy Expert. Last time I checked, I had 116 GB of pictures (not counting any of the bad images I already deleted, but including the finished images ready to use for posters, the web and other applications).

The local backup options

So, let’s see what is possible. I intend to surprise you with some of what you may learn here and in the next posts about these backup possibilities.

External hard disk drive

One of the first ideas coming to mind is to add another disk drive (usually an external one). This is certainly the easiest: Go to your preferred on-line computer shop and get nearly any of the zillion disk drives available. One of the most important decision to make: Choose the nicest or the biggest drive available.

Since it will be used only for backup, you don’t need a very fast one. Since it will be used only once in a while, you don’t need to have it permanently plugged in. There are not many differences between the large brands on the market, but avoid what I call the monsters (extreme drives like size champions or speed champions tends to compromise on other aspects like reliability, which is our priority here). I love the extreme reliability of Seagate drives, but that doesn’t necessarily stop me from buying other brands occasionally.

Notice that some hard drive manufacturers started offering relatively large drives targeting low-cost and high reliability by running them slow: 5400 rpm drives (compared to 7200 rpm or faster) are making a come back on the market. It may be worth considering here.

Nevertheless, it is important to buy a disk that is not too small. Reliability goes with big manufacturing volumes. Buy a disk around 100€ (bare disk), or 120-150€ (with its enclosure). This is the core of the market and the best rliability/cost ratio.

However, the main problem here is that you have to organize the backup by yourself. Some external hard drives incorporate a button on the front: You just press the button and it backs up the designated files or directories. But even if it is as simple as that, studies and experience show that the user (you and me) will forget and backups must be automated.

I suggest the following automated backup tools:

• Cobian backup (Windows, free, donation suggested): A lot of options, very apt at disk-to-disk scheduled backups. Exactly what we need here.
• Backup Maker (Windows, free but with nagging pop-ups): Does external drive backups, optical backups, FTP backups, scheduled backups.
• GFI backup (Windows, free with email registration) is definitely easy-to-use and wizard-driven. Clear and simple.
• PureSync (Windows, freeware) and SyncBack (Windows, freeware and shareware) are tools that specialize in synchronization (and backups): They allow to create and maintain perfect copies of your files, but you take the risk that they will reproduce your erroneous file deletion (you delete the original, then it deletes the copy for you). PureSync allows to create a profile to recognize your digital camera and ignore photos from your memory card already downloaded to your computer (similar to the same feature in Picasa).

[to be continued]