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  1. Member
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    My mother has lots of pictures on her 250GB C drive so I've been thinking of getting her an 1TB external drive and then copying all her pictures to it for a backup, I would leave this unplugged unless adding more pictures.

    I found this http://www.buy.com/prod/western-digital-elements-1tb-usb-2-0-external-hard-drive-black for a decent price but it seems it only has a one year warranty, are one year warranties the norm for external drives in this price range? Should I be scared away with such a short warranty?
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    1yr is about standard.

    even if it's 10 years and it fails your data is lost so just make sure you keep everything in at least 2 locations.
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    Okay thanks I guess in her case she would have the pictures on her C drive plus on the external drive.

    She kind of has another issue though her C drive is so loaded with pictures it has used up all her space, any ideas short of buying two drives for backup and deleting the pictures from the C drive?
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  4. Member wtsinnc's Avatar
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    What it the total size of the photo collection ?

    You could backup to not only an external hard drive, but also to DVDs as a backup to your external hard drive backup.

    Once the backup(s) have been verified, you can then free that space on the C drive.

    Of course, you could always buy two hard drives and use each for the backup process.
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    Since I live in a different town I just remotely took over her computer and clicked on Properties of her My Pictures folder and the size was 2.75gb if that was the figure you needed, I suppose that really doesn't sound like that much.

    I guess using dvds plus the external drive might be the cheapest option.

    Just a thought I suppose it might be nice to have a program to continually backup new pictures to the external drive but then it would have to be plugged in all the time and that might defeat the purpose.

    If I decide to delete the pictures from her C drive to make it easier for her I suppose there must be a way to point My Pictures from the Start Menu to the external drive.
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  6. If you are only talking about 2.75 GB of pictures on a 250 GB drive, an external drive would not seem to be necessary. Archive them off onto a DVD and just leave them on C:.

    Problem might be as simple as needing to make some folders to organize them, just so the initial list is not so large.

    Old people often get the thought that lots of files slows down the PC. It's only running progs which slow it down, although displaying a list with 5,000 items on it is a lot slower than a few hundred or so. Thumbnail view can multiply this time delay.
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  7. Member
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    Okay then maybe she doesn't need an external drive, if the figure I gave you is right there must be alot of other things taking up her space although I wouldn't know what all she has is pictures.

    Just looked at her C drive and it is only 120GB so not nearly as big as I thought.
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  8. Member wtsinnc's Avatar
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    This is the perfect job for a USB flash drive.
    Just transfer the pictures folder to the flash drive and confirm that you can access them.

    Because of the low cost and portability of flash drives, I would buy two 4 or 8 gb drives and copy the photo folder to each.

    Whenever you or she takes more pictures, add to the files on both flash drives (right click on the pictures folder, context menu option "save target as..").
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  9. Member wtsinnc's Avatar
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    Correction;

    Right click on the pictures folder, select "Send To", not "save target as".

    -My error.

    With the flash drive installed , the "Send To" option should show (among other options), the flash drive.

    Good luck !
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  10. Member
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    Okay thanks!
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  11. Member Skith's Avatar
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    I wouldn't trust flash media as a reliable storage media. If the photos are important I would also burn a copy to DVD and/or CD. Don't use cheap media http//www.nomorecoasters.com for more info.

    When archiving anything important, redundancy is important as no media is guaranteed to hold data for any length of time. I burn all my important photos in duplicate, plus store them on a hard drive.
    Some people say dog is mans best friend. I say that man is dog's best slave... At least that is what my dogs think.
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