Of everything I have on my home PC, nothing is more important than my pictures and I am sure many of you are in the same boat. In a previous article, I spoke about the 3-2-1 backup strategy to protect your irreplaceable files. 

So how do you "easily backup your digital treasures" onto multiple online services? Enter PicBackMan. It is a simple program that can help backup your social network pictures (locally) and at the same time backup your local pictures to one or more online services. You create a free account so the app can store your connection settings and then jump straight into the simple configuration.

As mentioned, you can configure sources to backup from, think Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. Then you can choose the destinations to backup to, like Skydrive, Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, Dropbox, etc.

Once you have configured once source and one destination, the program springs [automatically] into action and start backing up your pictures. Of course it monitors the dedicated source locations and automatically performs a backup when a new picture is found.

One interesting feature is how granular the configuration can be. You can setup different [local] folders for the different services and then configure the app to upload the content of those folders to specific online services. As an example, you can have a FACEBOOK directory locally and tell the app to automatically upload everything in that directory to Facebook.

 They currently have a Windows version only and it works in Windows 7 and Windows 8. They will be releasing IOS, Android and MAC versions in the future.

With products like this, I alway wonder how it will be monetized. At least right now, the service is free but it seems the developers may add additional for-pay functions later (which is fine with me).

 

Tell the app where your pictures are, online and offline

 

Tell the app where to backup your pictures

Verdict

I played with the app for a couple of weeks and tested various complex backup and save designs, the app worked flawlessly. I think this is one of those little gems that may become a must on all of your PCs and [soon] smartphones.

For me the winning combination was the power, simplicity and reliability. I give this app two thumbs up.