I have two young children who I'm pretty sure are the cutest children in the world. I also have an aging PC that's full of photos of my little beauties. With my hard drives nearly buried under the weight of all those snapshots, I needed a backup plan. Enter Hewlett-Packard's SimpleSave Photo, a backup product that's about as easy as it gets.

HP SimpleSave Photo comes in a pack of five DVDs that retails for $15. (Memorex offers virtually the same product, in a version called Memorex SimpleSave Photo & Video Back-Up Discs; it's also available in a five-disc pack for $15.)

The most difficult part of using HP's product was opening the package; once I managed to break open the sticker warning me to read the end-user license agreement, I was in business. All of the DVDs include the SimpleSave software component, which launches automatically once you pop any one of the five discs into your DVD burner. The application automatically finds photo and video files (it recognizes more than 100 file formats) on your PC. Within 3 minutes the software identified 8569 photos and 159 video files on my two hard drives.

It then gave me the choice to include or exclude all photos and all videos, or to view the files to select which ones I wanted to backup. I elected to include all of the files in my backup, which, according to the application, was 11.5GB and would require three DVDs. After that, I clicked the button to start the backup, and exchanged the DVDs when prompted to do so. In about 20 minutes, my backup was complete.

You can use your backup DVD to restore your files should anything happen to them, or to view them on another PC. I inserted one of my backup discs into another PC and was able to browse through my photos and videos, which were organized in the same folder structure I'd used to store them on the original PC.

Buying a stack of blank DVDs and backing up files manually would be cheaper. But SimpleSave is a much easier way for anyone to make sure their priceless photos are protected.

--Liane Cassavoy