How do I back-up the 1000's of pictures/videos on my laptop?

[Supercherry]

I think there is something wrong with the DVD burner/rewriter because it won't burn them onto a disc (this could be me of course!).

I have heard of a USB memory stick but have a few queries. What sort of memory would be needed. Does it take ages? How does one download the pics/videos to the stick? Does the memory stick have to be compatible with my Sony Vaio laptop?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as if I lost these photos I would be absolutely gutted (they are all of my children).

If you have thousands of photos/songs, you might find an External Hard Drive like this one better-you can get them in all sizes and they plug in to the USB port like a USB stick but you'll find it faster to transfer.

Some of them have dedicated programs so you can set up a back up which will run every time you plug it in, or you can just copy the files manually.

I have a little red one which I have all my work files on, so I just plug it in at home & it appears on my computer as another disk drive - so the main hard drive is C, the CD/DVD drive is D and the external drive is E and I just open & save files in the normal way.

Thanks Rustybear. When I go into 'Pictures' on my comp this is then divided into about a 100 folders in which there are loads of photos/videos. Can I just save them all by savings Pictures to the drive or do I have to into each photo or folder?

Would the hard drive have to be compatible?

Oh and would I be able to take that into, say Boots, for example and print off the pics?

You should be able to select all the folders and copy or drag them over; then you'd still have all your pictures organised into folders

As far as I know most if not all hard drives are compatible with any computer that has a USB port - if yours was very old & has USB 1 rather than 2 it might be a problem, but it would have to be pretty old, and as you say your main folder is called 'Pictures' rather than 'My Pictures', I'm guessing you have either Vista or Windows 7, so it should have USB 2. You can check with the place you buy it, but I would expect it to be fine.

I'm not sure whether anyone does printing off a hard drive - presumably you could plug it in to the USB slot on a self-service machine, but it might take rather a long time to pick out your pictures from tbhousands! but you could copy pictures you wanted onto a small USB & take that in or use an online service.The hard drive option is more for a backup for safety of a big archive rather than portability of a few photos.

Oh Thanks Rustybear- am in awe of your computer detective like skills. It's Vista. The USB port got cracked though (thank you DS1) so it has a USB adaptor stuck in the side of it currently so I can still upload photos from my camera.

Well I might purchase the external drive purely for back up then but that still leaves me with needing a memory stick I think.

My laptop is so slow so I don't mind spending a couple hrs in Boots sifting through the pics I want to print. There are 2.5 years worth and I really need to get them printed and organised.

Think I should have just stuck with good old fashioned disposable camera.