I finally bought an external hard drive and back up my whole computer on a regular basis. I also use the cloud, Apple and Amazon. Both free for 5 gb and easily accessible.

I know what flash drives are but not how to get "thing" from the computer to them. Can someone give me any directions because I would love to put all my MSQ tutes on one drive. Do you just plug them into your computer and then what?

I know, how sad am I but I'm lucky I still know how to turn my computer on to read email :-)

Hi, Roberta. When you plug a new flash drive into a computer, it will take a little minute to recognize it. Then you can right click on something, a picture, music or whatever and when the window comes up you will see a line that says "send to". At that point you pick "Removable Disk E" (or some letter). Click on that and it will go to the flash drive. It is a handy way to keep stuff. You will love it.

Sounds so easy even I can do this Boston 1954. From one "almost" Bostonian (Lynn here) to another, thank you.

when a computer dies, which they do, my son usually retrieves the hard drive, puts it in a case, and it is a portable hard drive with everything I had still there and accessible. I have several now. Gotta take some time and organize them one day, but it is a great way to keep the info. It is rarely the hard drive that crashes, but a mother board or some such. He keeps em humming

Ohhh, please be careful carrying a lot of personal data around on flash drives!! If they get stolen, there goes all your private info. Use password protection, and know that even that is not all that secure and can be pretty easily hacked by following instructions online. Might be better to make a couple sets of copies and place those copies with trusted friends/family to store in their homes for you, or (even better) in a safe deposit box.

I have an external drive that runs a backup from my PC every night. DH has one on his main PC doing nightly backups as well, and then we have an "extra" PC on the network that pulls backups from both external drives once a week. Then about once a year or so we do a full backup of everything onto a drive we keep at my cousin's house - we figure odds are very low that we'll BOTH have house fires the same day. Setting up the network backup was kind of complicated but setting up the backup to the external drive was EXTREMELY easy - the drive comes with software specifically for that purpose so you just decide on a schedule and pick the folders you want backed up and you're done.

Kind of a funny story...I found a flash drive in the parking lot at work. I'm in IT, so I took it to our "uh oh" PC to plug it in to see if we could figure out who it belonged to (this PC is off network, so if this drive was full of viruses it couldn't infect anything important) and it turned out to be a lot of those nude-pregnancy-boudoir style photos of my coworker and his wife! It was really awkward, as I had my supervisor with me to view the files. (They were "tasteful", but still...) We flipped a coin to see who had to go give it back and I lost. I just handed it to him and said, "Um...it appears that this belongs to you." He turned red...I turned red....and we never spoke of it again. LOL So watch those thumb drives, and use passwords!!! LOL

I label my embroidery ones with a label maker, ITH, FSL, applique

I use flash drives for everything important. I have two sets, and when I go to see my Mom twice a year I take the new one and give it to her so there is always a back up in another state in case I had a disaster at my home and lost everything.

Yes, such as easy way of backing up important files. They keep making them so they hold more data each year.