I don't save all of my designs to a flash drive. I save the ones from class or that I'm stitching out and then every so often I go in and clean it out saving them to the appropriate folders on pc. I also have a CD backup too. Having all of your designs only in one place is scarey, especially if its a flash drive. They've been known to get corrupt and of course they ae easy to lose. If you don't have enough space on your pc to save them and have it run right then by all means get a portable hard drive. You can get one that's fairly small for 70 to 100. Worth it if it not only protects your designs, free or other wise. Alot of times the designs we get free aren't free later on and not all companies keep track and will let you down load them again. I have a folder called orders and under that are folders for each company that I get designs from. The designs in these folders keep thier orginal names so that if something happens to them I can contact the company and give them the orginal name (important especially if they've been archived) and I can redownload them. I save these designs again in folders to what they are like Holidays, then Christmas or Easter, whatever needed, then I create a folder under that with the company name and that's where they are saved. I don't change the name since the folder tells me what they are for. I save all of these folders, the orginal ones and the ones in each category to a cd so that if something happens or I need to put them on a new pc, I can just copy them over and don't have to do all of that work again. They are all where they need to be. I also have very little saved to my machine even though I've been told that I have lots of storage there. I like knowing where they all are and having them protected is very important rather on a separate CD or a portable hard drive. Good luck.