I just wanted to share a great gift idea for your child’s grandparents, or perhaps even for yourself. Zumyn allows you to create a mosaic photo of your child using your entire collection of baby photos. The web site’s photo upload tool compresses your pictures before uploading (saving you plenty of time), and the clever Zumyn software will then arrange your photos to represent any particular picture you choose. It’s free to use, but you can pay for prints on photo paper or canvas if you like the results.

For Henry’s 1^st birthday we took a photo of him and then used Zumyn to turn it into a mosaic using every single one of the 2,400 photos we have taken of him since he was born. We treated ourselves to a canvas print and the result really is stunning. Sat in our lounge we can see the overall image of Henry with his cute little cheeks, but close up we can pore over all the great memories from his first year.

You wouldn’t let your child juggle hand grenades whilst riding through the deserts of Afghanistan on the roof of a tank, would you? And yet you trust the thousands of precious baby photos and birthday videos to a crappy old laptop that you never even back up? Before I call social services, here’s an opportunity for redemption.

Online backup is a good start to keep the top priority family jewels safe (along with the lingerie photos of your wife), and I would highly recommend Mobile Me or Jungle Disk for that purpose. But online backups just can’t cope with the huge amounts of data that you’re likely to be dealing with, so then you must turn to external hard drives. The Western Digital Passport is a great choice for a small, quiet and reliable backup disk, but if you really cared about your kids you’d get a NAS.

Now I’m not talking about Nas as in the rapper who rhymes about bitches ‘n guns, I’m talking about NAS as in Network Attached Storage. These are hard disks that connect to your network to make backing up smooth, seamless, and hidden away. What’s more, they can come with 2 hard disks that both contain the same data in a so-called ‘RAID’ configuration. That way you have a backup of your backup – now isn’t that a wonderful way to tell your children that you love them? My current NAS top choice is the Buffalo LinkStation Mini (500 GB or 1 TB) – one of the smallest and quietest NAS drives on the market.