Best way/place to back up photos, documents etc. from old laptop?

[SoftKittyWarmKitty]

Apologies for having two threads running on this section of MN but I've got two separate issues and thought the best way to get definitive answers was to split them up.

My laptop is very old and I suspect is on it's last legs. I've got loads of photos, plus some documents etc saved on the hard drive that I don't want to lose. I've backed some up to a USB stick but this is now full. I tried saving my photos to DVDs that I happened to have in a drawer in order to free up space but it won't do it - says Windows will not enable this action at present. I joined Dropbox but didn't realise there's a charge for saving more than 2GB of stuff on there and I'm skint at the mo and can't afford an additional monthly cost.

Is my best bet to get more USB sticks and save everything to them? Or is there some kind of free online hosting place, where I'd be able to save everything then get it back again once I have a new laptop?

I'm terrified that one day it just won't switch on and I'll lose everything :( , so any advice would be really appreciated.

I would buy a big external disk drive, you can get huge ones over 500GB for around £50 to £100 (so that's 250 times as much as a free drop box account). Then properly back up your photos and documents to that external disk but don't remove them from your computer. Then if/when you do get a new computer just copy the ones you want off of the external drive onto the new machine and then keep using the external disk as a backup of your files.

Basically never ever just have the files in one place, be that on a laptop or an external disk. Keeping the files on an external disk and on a computer at the same time isn't a perfect back up solution but it's a brilliant first step.

But don't give up on your old machine yet, keep with the advice you're being given and we should get it back up and running to a semi-decent state.

Thanks, that's good advice. As I'm not great with techical stuff ('no shit!', I can hear you think) where do I get an external hard drive from, and how do I use it? Does it just plug in somehow, so that I can drag stuff across?

I usually don't like recommending particular products but this is a much bigger and more recent version of what I use and am very happy with:
www.amazon.co.uk/Passport-Essential-Black-Portable-Drive/dp/tech-data/B004445JK4

However I don't use the software that comes with it, I just blank the drives and use them how I want to use them.

If you don't use any particular software you do just plug them in and they appear as another drive in Windows that you can drag stuff to and from.

Most computers will run the drive through a single USB cable, however some older ones might not give out enough power over their USB port to drive the disk. If that happens you either need a powered USB hub (about £15 or so) or a drive that has an external power supply.

Thanks, I'll have a browse and see if I can see similar ones a bit cheaper, then order one. However, £90 is a lot cheaper than a new laptop!

As I think I've said before even with a new laptop you still need somewhere to backup all of your files, and an external disk is a good way of doing that. Having the files in just one place, on the laptop, is worryingly vulnerable to all sorts of problems.