And make sure that your ext PC has a slot for it!

sandy

Thank you all for the valuable information.....I always do learn something around you...this place have never let me down......

Thanks for the heads up . It never occurred to me that a flash drive would go bad. I have been transferring designs to flashdrives from my 35 discs. Better go get some cds and get busy.
One of my objections to flashdrives is that you can't write on them to identify the contents like you can on cd or discs. Since I will be transferring to cds, maybe I will get organized and put the flowers together , the geometrics together, the birds, the butterflies. . . . (Maybe)

I got so involved in reading this thread, I almost forgot why I came here. Long ago I read a tip about cleaning the hoops. If your hoops are dirty, say from spray adhesive, use baby wipes to clean them. I had some residue on the bed of my machine from cellophane tape. I didn't want to get out the GooGone, that would need cleaning off, too. Then I remembered baby wipes. The ones I had were pretty dry so I sprayed them with a little water and they cleaned the machine in seconds.

As for storing designs....I ended up storing everything in external hard disc....works for me...when I need somethjng I know where to look for it...the problem is organizing them constantlly.....happy scraping....

I also use an external hard disk to back up everything. I have three for my office computer that I rotate out every few weeks. When I start using a new one, I bring my laptop to the office backup it also. I usually end up with at least 3 copies of everything so if one goes bad, I still have another copy.

Make a backup of that drive online somewhere. I had a mostly full western digital brand external 3 terabyte hard drive die on me last March. ALL of my downloaded designs and ebooks and a million photos were on it, most of it irreplaceable. Years worth. Losing that HURT. When I asked my husband if he could retrieve the data off it (he's a computer guru) the first thing he said to me was "don't you have a backup?" I almost killed him. My external drive WAS my backup and my main storage because my laptop only had a 250 gb drive in it (it's an old laptop). And no, he couldn't get anything off that drive :( These days I have another external drive.. and everything on it gets automatically and continuously backed up to cloud storage via software called Backblaze as well. It's something like $5 a month and has both Mac and PC versions. I wish I'd had it before that drive died. I lost thousands of dollars of ebooks and music and downloaded embroidery designs and old scanned in family pictures. :(

Dear Keptwench,

I am sincerely sorry to hear of your losses. But thank you for advising the rest of us.

Keptwench, my son had a job with a company that restored data from disk drives. It was expensive, and I don’t know the name of the company, but your data may be saved.

I had an extra hard drive installed on my tower just to put all my files on it. So if the "C" drive crashes, my files are hopefully still there and they can just move the hard drive to another tower. Then I have 2 external hard drives to make a backup of those files. Thought my 1st external hard drive had bit the dust so went to my 2nd one. Found out later that what the problem was the cable to the external hard drive and not the drive itself. Luckily I hadn't thrown it out.