How to backup or move Picasa albums

I’ve been very happily managing my photos with Picasa since version 2. Many machines ago, I began storing photos along with all my other portable data in a directory separate from the normal Windows user folder to make it easy to back up and move files between machines with an external hard drive. So far so good.

The problem is how to back up and/or move Picasa albums to a new machine, as these are not stored with your photo files like Picasa edits and captions are. Picasa 3 now offers a way to export the entire photo database; however, it is very slow and results in a very large file (multi-GB) when you have 10 years’ worth of digital photos. It’s not practical to export the entire database to make a weekly backup, so I was delighted to find this technique on a forum which allows you to move just your album data:

Restore Picasa albums

I’ve done it many times and it works. This way, you can continue to use an incremental backup solution for photo files and backup the tiny amount of data in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums\ to save your albums. The only catch is that when you rebuild the Picasa database as instructed in the link above, the photos referenced in the album must be in the same directory location as they were when the album was created.

In order to ensure that my photos stay in the same directory structure even when Microsoft changes the location of the Users folder between, say, XP and Vista, I keep all my photos in a directory outside the Windows user directory (I use C:\@My\Photos). When I get a new machine, all I have to do is:

1. Copy the whole C:\@My directory to the new machine
2. Install Picasa
3. Copy the Picasa2Albums directory into place under the Users folder (C:\Users\David\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums\ in Vista)
4. Rebuild the Picasa database as instructed above using the Shift+Ctrl+Alt combination.

Of course, this technique may not be supported forever, and hopefully won’t be needed as Google continues to improve Picasa. But for now, it allows me to backup my albums on a regular basis and know that I’ll be able to move my photos, albums and all, to a new machine when needed.

http://picasa.google.com/

Free Web conferencing for Windows, Linux, and Mac

Yuuguu.com

I recently needed to share my Windows desktop with a Linux user over the Internet. It took only minutes to install the Yuuguu client and start sharing my screen. Remote viewers don’t need to install anything, as there is a Web viewer. But if the remote participants do install the Yuuguu client, they can also request control of the presenter’s screen.

Yuuguu also gives you a telephone conference line with global dial-in numbers. It is a free service in the US, although you still have to dial long distance.

Yuuguu lets you chat across several instant messaging networks. And it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Funny name, great service!

Run Linux and Windows together without dual booting

Welcome to “the Saturday evening post.” This will be a more-or-less weekly PC tech post in addition to my daily Java-related postings throughout the week.

There are two programs I can’t live without under Linux: Quicken, which I first installed on 3.5 inch floppies and has run my financial life ever since, and RoboForm, which manages nearly 100 mostly-generated passwords for me. As much as I would like to run Ubuntu and OpenOffice exclusively, I am unwilling to dedicate another PC to the task or to be constantly rebooting.

I was therefore delighted to find that you can run Ubuntu right within Windows as a virtual machine using the free VMware Player. Here are the steps to install Ubuntu on a clean virtual machine.

1. Download and install VMware Player
2. Download the Ubuntu ISO image
3. Go to easyvmx.com and fill in the blanks to create your virtual machine definition file. Check the LiveCD ISO-image box and enter the path to the downloaded ISO file. When you run VMware Player for the first time, it will boot from the ISO image just as if you had put the CD in the drive, allowing you to run or install Ubuntu in the virtual machine.

That’s all there is to it. Granted, with this approach, you still have to deal with Windows, but being able to switch back and forth between operating systems with Alt+Tab sure is handy.

A very cool thing about virtual machines is that all the data for the VM exists in a few files under your VMX directory. Which means you can copy the VMX files to a portable hard drive, plug it into any computer with VMware Player installed, and voila, you’re right where you left off. That is one painless backup strategy.

Theoretically, you can also run the other way around, by the way, and install Windows in a virtual machine running under VMware Player for Linux. However, I have not tried this.

Ubuntu USB Wireless

Reason why I love the open source community #157:

Please leave really detailed comments on wiki pages like this one about which hardware actually works with your OS. See the comment for the FD7050, v4001.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsBelkin#USB

After reading this page and related pages for other vendors, I stopped my local Target, and was pleasantly surprised to find the Belkin myEssentials line of components, but not the myEssentials USB wireless adapter which so many folks have said works fine with Ubuntu and is very cheap ($15-$25). But not to worry, the Belkin referenced above was on the shelf for $35, and it featured a barcode sticker with “ver. 4001″ on it. Bingo!

I plugged it in to my Ubuntu 7  machine, waited a few seconds, clicked the network manager on the launcher bar, and it had already found my network. I entered my password for WPA2-PSK (AES), held my breath, and voila, I can now move the Ubuntu machine to the basement for the kids

/dmc

Ubuntu Saves the Day (Again)

Vista crashed again on a friend’s misbehaving Thinkpad, resulting in the invitation to reinstall Windows at startup. Whereas this had happened several times recently and Windows was unable to repair the installation previously, resulting in the loss of all data, and whereas my friend had stayed up till 3AM working on MBA projects that would now be lost, said friend was in despair.

Enter Ubuntu. We booted off the LiveCD and attempted to mount the windows drive, which Ubuntu had automatically detected. The disk was flagged with an unclean shutdown, so it did not mount, but Ubuntu provided a helpful error message with the complete syntax of the mount command with “force” option to recognize the drive. With a little additional Linux knowledge and trial and error, we came up with

sudo mkdir /media/SW_Preload
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /media/SW_Preload -o force

Voila! There was the dead Windows drive, ready for transfer to USB flash or external hard drive.

Even if you don’t install Ubuntu, you should download a CD before you need it.

Related recommendations:

Backup 2 GB free at idrive.com. Easy and secure. Features continuous backup mode that will backup changes every 10 minutes.

Karen’s Power Tools Replicator is a free, lightweight utility for doing full or differential backups to an external hard drive. I set mine to run every hour.

/dmc