where can I put photos and open HD space

[bondo]

I'm new to the digital photography world but I've caught the bug big-time. I'm absolutely loving it, but don't know what I'm doing most of the time (a true learning experience every time I take a shot). But now I have a bunch of pics on my hard drive (I do have a photo program, but still, they're on my hard drive) and eventually will reach a crucial level. What can I do with them? Is there some kind of peripheral I can add to my box to hold pics? I would rather not download them to a disk because I use them often for different things so I'd like to have them easily accessible. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Peter_AUS]

Best thing is get an external drive that hooks up through either USB 2 or Firewire and use that to store your images. You then keep them off of your system and on their own drive that is removable and portable if you need as well. The other thing to do is back them up to DVD's as well for protection of the image. Most people do at least that as a minimum. Some actually do it to three seperate storage devices, like another Hard Drive, two or more DVD's or CD's and then store those in different places for added protection. You could also look at tape storage as well, although that is relatively expensive compared to an external Hard Drive, per meg although Tape is relative a safe way of going over the Hard Drive and DVD/CD way of backing up.

[bondo]

Thanks much Peter. I'm not pc savvy at all, so please bear with me. Would an external hd be like a "box" that I'd download my images to and then just connect to my pc whenever I needed to use images for anything? And does it need to be configured or anything whenever I connect it? Are some external hd's better than others? Also, could you briefly explain Firewire...I've never heard that term. Thank you so much for your patients...promise I won't ask anything else!!!

[SmartWombat]

Pardon me for jumping in, Yes.

I now have a stack of 4 disk drives in boxes next to my computer.
Images up to 2004 - 1 200G drive
First part of 2005 - 1 200G drive
Second part of 2005 - 1 250G drive
and I have one free.

I'm a geek, so I build my own.
But it's not too expensive to buy them.

I would have uploaded a photo of my solution, but I'm getting "server not found" errors.

[dmm96452]

Thanks much Peter. I'm not pc savvy at all, so please bear with me. Would an external hd be like a "box" that I'd download my images to and then just connect to my pc whenever I needed to use images for anything? And does it need to be configured or anything whenever I connect it? Are some external hd's better than others? Also, could you briefly explain Firewire...I've never heard that term. Thank you so much for your patients...promise I won't ask anything else!!!

Here is a link to one of many places you can get external hdds from. If you have a local Best Buy or some type of computer store I'm sure you can pick one up there as well. I would stick with a name like Maxtor or Seagate myself. They've been in the hdd biz for quite a while.

Most need little to no configuration. Just plug them in and the operating system on your computer takes care of the rest. When you open MY Computer it will appear as removable media which is just a fancy way of saying that it is some type of storage that can be disconnected from the computer.

Firewire is just another way to connect devices to a computer, like usb. A little faster but not as widely available.

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