Backing Up Catalog Questions

I did not have the benefit of PSA2 and am now in the process of tagging all my photos into PSE3's Organizer. I am even taking the bold step of adding back in all my photos from 2000 forward back onto my hard drive, just so I can have the greatest search capability. I have already spent several hours on this task and now I sense that a backup is advisable. I want to back up onto CDs, and have two questions:

1. The Help section states that a backup makes a copy of the catalog as well as the photos, video clips, etc. that have been brought into PSE3. Am I to understand this to mean that the actual PHOTOS will be backed up on disk as well? Or does the backup only include the "linking info" that connects PSE3 associated info with the photos on the hard drive? I really don't need or want the PSE3 backup function to make a backup of the actual photos themselves on disk, since I already do that separately at the end of each month. It seems like overkill to make a backup of what I anticipate will already be a couple thousand or more photos that I have already backed up separately.

2. I assume that after my first big backup, I will only need to make incremental backups of data that has been added/changed since the last backup. With this in mind, is it better to use CD-Rs or CD-RWs? This is probably an elementary question, but I will admit I've never figured it out.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Do you actually want to back up your photos or just the catalog?
The key file to preserve is the My Catalog.PSA file.
The backup facility in PSE 3 will enable you to save your pics and catalog. I don't know whether you can now add to a CD. In PSA 2 you couldn't.

Personally, I don't use this facility. I just make sure that my catalog and images are picked up by my regular backup.

Hi Colin, I do NOT want to back up my photos, I only want to back up the portion of PSE3 that contains all of my customized tag and collection info, etc. So I gather all I need to do is just back up the My Catalog.PSA file on a separate CD? I don't have a global backup system for my PC; I just back up data files as needed. Thanks very much.

So I gather all I need to do is just back up the My Catalog.PSA file on
a separate CD?




Yep, that will get everything vital.

PE3.0 Backup Problem. After I installed PE3.0, being an "upgrade" of 2.0, I performed the first backup as a "full" backup. Now, a month later, I'm unable to do an "incremental" backup. The utility correctly reads the destination and name of the first backup, but then it performs a "full" backup. For me, that's 7GBs, or 2 DVDs. When inserting the second disk (yes, they're correctly "+RW" to correspond to my drive)I am required to "burn" it to complete the job. I discover that the first backup did the same thing. Should I be fully formatting these disks first or just leaving it to the PE utility to do its thing? Is there something else I'm missing??

I haven't actually checked out PSE 3's backup [as I can't find any use for it], but I know that PSA 2 did not support multi-session CD-ROMs - it always finalized them.