March 2019 Newsletter

Google promises to backup for free, an unlimited number of pictures and short videos on your phones, tablets and computers with great searching and sharing features once they are online.  Their “catch” is that they compress your photos to take up less space. For the most part you wouldn’t see the difference, but if it bothers you, for $36 a year for 200 GB, you can backup the exact copies.  If you are using a Google phone, it would be free. https://www.google.com/photos/about/

Amazon offers the same free service without compressing the photos and it can automatically backup your iPhone or Android phone photos.  The catch is that it is part of Amazon Prime for $119 a year.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8&node=13234696011

Tip of the month
Using Google Backup and Sync
Google Drive is a great option for cloud storage and backup.  If you have a Google account (free, of course) you have 15 GB of space available to you.  That does include your Gmail account.  If you decide to just save text documents, you should have plenty of free space, but PDFs and media files can quickly use up that allotment.  However, for $20 a year, you can use 100GB of space.  That comes out to only $1.67 a month and if you have no other backup in place, you won’t find another method much cheaper.  Your Google Drive is also accessible at any time through a web browser at https://drive.google.com. Since you can use your browser to download files from Google Drive to your device, it can also be a handy way to transfer contents from your phone to a laptop or desktop PC.

Using the browser as mentioned above is one way to store your files – simply by dragging and clicking.  Another option however is to use Google’s free Backup and Sync desktop app,  Once installed, you will have a fairly easy setup.  By default, the desktop app will select your Documents and Pictures folders, plus whatever files and folders are sitting on your desktop.