i read so many threads about people keeping pix on their hard drives. thought i would give you a tip where you could save these and not worry about losing them. the photo below is a flash drive--it is about 2 inches long and fits in your computer. They are less than $20 and worth the peace of mind. i don't have a printer--so i originally used this to take items off my laptop to get copies made of patterns, etc. the best part is i loaded it ALL off my laptop & it isn't SLUGGISH any more!!! YES!!

About how many pictures can you store on there?

Good suggestion! I use these all the time in work and finally figured out they'd work just as well at home, storing pictures and such.

However, if you're prone to losing things (e.g., my boyfriend does), you might want to get an inexpensive storage container for it. They're only slightly bigger, hold more than one thumb drive, and zip up. They're also harder to lose!

A LOT! i've used this for at least two years and i have thousands of files on it---i use it to back up my laptop & so far it hasn't failed me. Because picture files are so large, it's hard to say. if you look on the back of the package you will get a better idea.

if you look at the right hand corner there is a little metal ring on it and that's where a piece of ribbon/lace comes in handy--then you can hang it or put it on your keyring!!! they think of everything

i was looking at them at walmart the ohter night, they were $8. but it needed a micro adapter and they of course didn't carry those or were out. I wanted it for my camera.

I have a Verbatim backup system that collects the photos.

wow, thanks for starting this thread learning something new every day

sounds like a storage card, i have one of those for my camera which allows you to expand your photo capabilities. if it was a flash drive for $8 i would have bought a dozen! i paid more than twice that for mine, [but it is 4 gig]

It depends on the quality setting on your camera, on how many pictures a thumb/flash drive will hold, as well as the size of the drive. I take pictures on the best quality on my camera and they take up a LOT of room on these. I filled my 4gig flash drive with about 300 pictures....

I went to storing everything on Carbonite, an online service, it automatically uploads all of my documents and pictures for around $50 a year. I can access them from any computer or internet device, and if my computer should crash, I can re-download everything.

I do use flash drives for transferring data from one computer to another, but like your computer's hard drive, they can fail....

i suggest you back them up on the drive..when i lost my computer to a virus, i lost everything! they are so cheap to buy now..2 gig, 4 gig..i bought a 2gig for 10 bucks on sale at walgreens a few weeks ago..plenty of room!

I love mine... both are 4 gigs that i bought right b4 christmas for $12 each.
but i generally use an external hard drive for my pics, as i have spent the last few years making computer graphics, when i didnt think i would be able to go back to quilting.

I have an external hard drive for backups and such (must remember to get that done sometime soon!), and store a lot of the pictures, music, etc., I have for my Palm TX on a removable SD memory card (similar to my camera's card).

Every high school kid I know carries one on their key chain. They live and die by those things. My daughter has dozens of papers, study guides, and notes on hers. Along with pictures and junk that she just has.

I have to chime in on this.

I learned the hard way that these flash drives are not the "be all and end all." As Amma said, these can fail and that is what mine did. None of the date could be recovered.

Amma had another good suggestion of subscribing to a backup service. However, if you do not want to spend the money, you should have several backups, AND do it regularly, not every 6-9 mos as I had done. Create backups on two flash drives plus an external hard drive, and save files to CD's also.

I had a string of bad luck in that the external hard drive that I backed up my files on died at the same time as the flash drive. I checked into some of the data recovery companies and they quoted me a fee of a minimum of $2500 to get data off the external hard drive! I finally found one that was cheaper at $700, sent the drive to them but unfortunately the data was unrecoverable. I am not sure if it is possible to recover data from a flash drive - may be Amma knows. (I got the impression from "experts" I talked to that it is not possible.)

That $50 subscription fee looks cheap compared to $2500.

I will sign off now so that I can run those backups that I have not done in a month.

What a great idea. I store my photos on photobucket. Is that safe?

Or you could get a 1.5 TB external drive,I store everything on there.