How big does it need to be?

[TheMasterNotMargarita]

Can anyone help?
I need to buy an external hard drive as I want to get rid of our bulky desktop computer. I want to back up photos, word documents, no movies or huge files other than the photos (probably in the region of 1200?).
I just don't want to buy something ridiculously big when it isn't necessary.

Thanks for any advice, am rubbish with this stuff.

I would expect to pay about £50. Prices tend to drop. I see that would now get you a 1 TB drive, which is more than adequate.

If you see a 500GB going a bit cheaper, that would do as well. You really ought to back up your treasured photos and docs to CD or DVD from time to time, label them, and put them in a safe place (preferably not in the same building as your PC, in case of fire).

sorry I meant to include a drive&c=503,&m=0&b=2,3,& link as an example

try again

www.novatech.co.uk/search.html?s=hard&c=503,&m=0&b=3,&

the search seems to come out different every time

you can sort by price

If the things you are backing up are very precious to you, back them up in more than one place. Hard drives can and do fail. Consider backing up to the cloud (eg google photos/drive) or invest in a NAS (network attached storage, that uses more than one hard drive so that if one fails you dont lose anything). Even DVDs will degrade after a few decades...

Thank you very.much. Photos are in a few places already but want to back up everything in one place too.

Appreciate the advice.

Every so often you should check your backup by attempting to restore some files. For the subset of files you can't live without (insurance details, address book etc) buy a USB stick and keep it with you.

Remember to adjust your antivirus software to scan your backups.