External Drive - how / where / get quickly

[IfYoureHappyAndYouKnowIt]

I know I should know this but!

I need to copy some personal stuff to a drive fairly quickly as I may need to give up my laptop very quickly in the next 36 hours.

Basically mainly photos and a few personal documents.

Any ideas on how I work out what size to get and where I can order / buy one quickly from?

Can you not just write them to a few DVDs/CDs or are there too many photos??

You can get an external hardrive from Amazon but you wouldn't get it before Thursday now. Any computer store would have one. 500gb is about the smallest I think and that would easily do you by the sounds of it.

HTH

tesco have lots. 250gb and 500gb. been looking for photos myself.

i just got dh one foe Xmas from Amazon. 2tb though so very large. i am sure comet and currys had them though too.

Ah, thanks for the replies, Tesco sounds like a good plan. Slightly hampered by the fact that I am currently abroad (complicated).

Any idea how much?

No CD drive, that is the problem.

why not utilise cloud storage?

how much data is it ?

if its less than 2GB, you can use the free dropbox to upload all your data.

www.dropbox.com

Why not buy a USB flash drive. Should be easy enough to find in a major supermarket or photo shop I would have thought.

think I need minimum 3gb maybe more

can't use dropbox cos do not have permissions set on laptop to enable software download (work restriction)

how big can a USB flash drive be?

A little searching on Amazon suggests that the current max is 128GB, but that's pretty expensive.

4 GB or 8 GB should do. I paid about a tenner for an 8 GB stick some months ago.

Pop to your nearest half decent sized Tesco. I was there yesterday and they are selling 4GB sticks for £10, 8GB for £15.

Portable hard drives are £35 for 250GB and £50 for 500GB.

Just go with what you prefer the size/price of.

IfYoureHappyAndYouKnowIt - please let us know how Tesco compares price-wise where you are, just out of interest (and where you are too, of course!)

I was in Rymans just after Christmas and they had some special offers on external hard disks and USB drives.

Thanks all

I'm finally getting to understand all of this

And in the end I've got a bit more time to sort this than I thought thank goodness

A bit undecided still whether to get an external drive or a USB stick but will get one or the other this weekend. May go to Tesco to check that option out first although its a bit of a drive (I am in the South East).

Thought you were abroad - or was that just when you wrote and you caught the train through the tunnel 'tween times... ?

I was abroad ... hence hard to buy what I wanted as location not brilliant for that. But back now