Whilst travelling in New Zealand I was able to connect to free but relatively low bandwidth access to the net, eg most libraries offer free WiFi and many cafes have 30minutes free WiFi etc. With this sort of free access it seem unnecessary to pay the exorbitant data roaming charges of telstra. The downside was the bandwidth is very limited but still. First I noticed it was almost impossible to shut my computer down. Then one night I was on line and loading a number of photos from several cards and the card seemed to hang. Everything on the computer just got slower and slower even when not connected to the net and I had to kill the system and restart it in safe mode. My first step was to get everything backedup to a backpack USB drive I always carry but being so busy I hadn’t done in a few days. 
Given all the publicity about the heartbleed vulnerability, virus and malware check was by first though but things checked out fine. I even did the full check disk thing, still ok. Then when I reconnected to the net I saw google+ autobackup was waiting to rebackup every photo on my laptop and suggesting it would take 73days! I did check the photo size it was trying to upload and it was still set to standard. If you select the standard size google+ autobackup only stores images at 2,048pixels in maximum dimension, which is fine for web display and small prints, and this size and smaller the storage is free (ie unlimited). I paused Autobackup immediately. However I ended up uninstalling it, rather than restarting it. Mainly because there is no obvious help files that I could find. Magically the slowness of my system and glitches loading photos disappeared. Sadly the specific card reader I was using at the time of the melt down has completely die.
Was Google+ AutoBackup the culprit?
Did I miss it, the highlights and autoawesomes. Not at all I was still able to share, with my family (not the world) via a new album I set up in Picasa.
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