ProtectMyPhotos: Simplest photo backup ever

If you want a backup solution to recommend to friends and family who aren't very tech-savvy, check out ProtectMyPhotos. It's the simplest backup solution I've seen. Its focus on protecting pictures is spot-on, too: ProtectMyPhotos CEO Cliff Shaw believes that saving family photos is the "number-one reason a person would run back into their burning house" (assuming really important things such as people and pets are out). I don't want to seem like a patsy, but I think he's right. In my house, the network backup drive is on the short list of things I plan to grab if I have to bug out fast.

ProtectMyPhotos is a better backup solution than any home-based backup drive, since it stores your files offsite (in two redundant locations, actually). There are other backup solutions, but ProtectMyPhotos has a few unique things going for it. First, as I said, it's very simple to set up--even easier than Carbonite, which is extremely straightforward. You could point just about anybody to the site, and they'd be able to get their backups running. This is not true for most other backup systems. Second, it has a very nice Web-based viewer where you can browse your backed-up photo library, and it makes restoring easy. (Mozy, a backup solution I also like very much, has no file-viewing services and puts strict limits on restoring files.)

Although it's been marketed to date as a photo-centric backup solution, ProtectMyPhotos now lets you back up certain document and music files, as well as video files of less than 100MB each. The service is $50 a year for 25GB of storage, which is a bit low, but Shaw plans to offer more storage for the same price soon.

Also to come: More photo-sharing services, and possibly a multi-PC synchronization service (see also: Sharpcast) to keep several computers in a family all up-to-date with the family's photos.

ProtectMyPhotos looks like a good picture backup service to recommend to your nontechie friends. And if you look beyond the name of the service, you might find it's a decent backup service for other file types, too.