Laptop and photo storage

[stella1w]

I have a 5 yr old laptop that has run out of memory. I have stored quite a lot of photos on it. I have tried to delete unwanted programs on it, but it doesn,t seem to make any difference and the computer keeps crashing. I think i am going to have to get a new laptop.. How can i transfer the photos over (know nothing and am terrified of losing them). Also should i perhaps not even store photos on the computer and if not there, where. When laptop was working, it wd download phjotos from my camera and soprt them by date taken which was great so i,d like to carry on doin that but maybe the copy them over to an external hard drive... Or is there a better way?

I copy all my photos on memory sticks. And glad I've done so cos I've had laptops "die" on me.

external hard drive

i keep all my music and photos on a good size (memory wise) hard drive. most laptops are famously rubbish for useable storage memory space.

If you are terrified of losing your photos you should immediately copy them to somewhere safe. If you have a DVD writer in the laptop and less than about 20GB of photos then copy them on to DVDs and store those DVDs somewhere separate from the laptop, so, in the event of a fire the backups don't go up in flames with the laptop. If you have more than 20GB or so it may be worth while getting a dual layer Blu-Ray writer, so you can write 50GB per disk. I recently bought this one to backup my wife's photo collection.

You should also regularly back up your photos to an external hard disk and update your off site backups reasonably often as well.

While I can see how a Blu-Ray drive might provide sufficient for storing photos etc, I'd put similar cash level into getting 2x 320GB external drives, one for home and one to be stored with a friend or relative, or in your workplace.

320GB should be plenty enough for most collections of data (some laptops have only 160 GB drives in them anyway) and if you get some backup software to automate backups you should be able to protect your data.

Some drives shown on Amazon include 'one touch' backup software. Just remember to unplug and take the external drive away for safety between backups.