Should I BACKUP my photos on Picasa and Google Web Albums?

Should I BACKUP my photos?

It’s important to note that because Picasa doesn’t store your photos (your hard drive still does), anything you delete in Picasa is also deleted from your hard drive and vice versa. If you accidentally delete photo files from anywhere on your hard drive, a “stored” copy will not be available in Picasa. As with any files on your computer’s hard drive, you’ll want to backup your Picasa photo files as well. You can do so by burning them onto a CD, DVD or backing them up onto another drive. Instructions for both can be found on this blog:

http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2008/03/sleep-soundly-back-up-your-p…

But what happens when I SAVE my photos, isn’t this the same as backing 
them up?

When you save edits (i.e. a photo you’ve turned into Sepia) we also save the original photo to a hidden folder and create a new copy of the image with the edits applied in place of where the original photo existed on your computer. However, the original and the edited photo are still associated with one another. Picasa saves your images so you can always go back to the original photo. However; as described above, if you delete the “edited” photo file from Picasa, you will also delete the original and vice versa. For more information on the saving of original photos, visit http://groups.google.com/group/Picasa/web/original-photo-files. 
Photos go into a hidden folder when saved, so the original and the edited photo don’t both show up in Picasa (Picasa doesn’t display images in hidden folders).

For more detailed information on the different “save” options, take a look here: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=11021