External Hard Drive

[Guest pebbles]

I just got a Simple Tech 149 GB external hard drive. It was recommended by Gateway which is what my computer is. I was wondering how does anyone else organize their pictures, scrapbooking files or anything else on it. I have moved most of my pictures over to it (after making yet another copy of them on a DVD!) You can never have too many copies, in my opinion! I have my scrapbooking files still on the computer and they are organized the way Ro suggested in the tutorial. Do I just move the whole scrapbooking file over and just turn on the external hard drive when I'm digital scrapbooking and need it or have files to unzip?
Any advice on how you all work with the XHD's would be very welcome!!!
Thanks!!

[gritstoner]

I use my external HD as another back up device in addition to DVDs. Just like you I think you can never have too many backups. I nearly lost all my digi photos when the family desktop computer decided to go haywire on us so now I make a point of backing up all the irreplacable items at least once a month. I use the same filing system on my external HD as on my laptop only I have an additional folder in my scrapbooking section for the zipped files which I don't keep on my laptop due to lack of space.

The only exceptions to this are my digital video files (no room on my laptop, but I also have a copy on my DH desktop) and the scanned slides & photos from our pre digi days (also on DH desktop - why do you need an 80GB HD when you only use the machine for surfing?)

The biggest problem I have is remembering to transfer things accross every month. I started out by just copying the files accross and saying yes to replacing the ones that already existed but even with my small collection (about 4.5GB) it takes some time. At the moment I'm keeping things separate in a '00newdownloads' folder (named so it is always the first in the list) and just transferring this accross each month. This means that I have to sort through and file all the unzipped items twice though which is a bit of a pain.

I'm toying with the idea of just transferring the zipped files and keeping them in their unzipped folders once unzipped on my external HD. This should work fine as I use the ones on my laptop to work from and if there is a problem I will just need to identify the collection it came from to find it on my external HD. In fact I think I've just talked myself into this and will go and do it later on.