I was told I need to preserve and edit some old VHS family tapes...

[Dash1]

Is the best way is to upload it on external HD[prices are going down]
should I Convert to digital from my VHS, save as a digital backup ,edit DIRECTLY
on the fast, external HDD and save the originals as well as edited version back on the same HDD.
I have ~60 hrs. of old VHS plus another 30HRS of DV.
What do you guys think??? What size and brend ?

[Krispy Kritter]

It is all matter of personal preference. You will need to first capture the video. DVD recorder would be easiest, but you could also do it with a capture card in a pc. After the video is captured, it can then be moved/saved to HDD.

Using a dvd recorder, you will use 4gig for every 2 hours of VHS. DV will likely be more. So I would look in the 300gig range.

Brand is also personal preference. It may or may not be cheaper to buy an external USB case and install your own HDD.

[Dash1]

I mean to capture, edit etc. just like with internal HD without loosing frames or quality !
I thought with DVD I will loose quality if I'll want to edit it too.
To capture it through the comp directly to external drive
without having to copy it to the internal drive for the edit.
And then , Detach and save it forever [On WD ?]...

[harley2ride]

If you aren't doing much editing, it won't hurt a bit to capture to a dvd recorder in mpeg2 or mpeg4. There are some pretty good mpeg editors which you could use. If you are thinking of doing quite a bit of editing, I would recommend capturing to dv-avi. Since you seem to have quite a bit of video, you could also look at doing a combination of both. Use the dvd recorder for stuff you won't need much editing on, and capture the rest as dv-avi.
As for storage, I have all of my video/photos backed up onto 2 seperate HD's (just in case one backup should go bad). It sounds like overkill, but I bought the HD's on black friday sales, and they were nearly free. I have duplicate backups of all my system stuff.