"Ami" wrote in message ...
Hi,

I apologize if this has been discussed many times, but everything I found
on groups search seemed much more complicated than I could handle.

For Christmas my husband got me a Maxtor Personal Storage 3200. His
intentions were for me to be able to move the pictures stored on my laptop
(using canon's zoombrowser) *not* for backup- but for storage. To
completely remove them from my laptop hard drive to free up space. Aside
from burning multiple backup cd's stored in multiple locations first (I
saw enough talk of that on my search to know everyone advocates this) is
this an o.k. thing to do? Does anyone else store their photos on an
external hard drive?

I am totally dumb as to how an external drive works.
Will I be able to use it like my computer's hard drive and install my
zoombrowser software /adobe elements etc. in that so I can work with my
pictures within the external drive or will I have to move the
pictures/files back to my laptop to use the installed software there to
edit etc. them? Most of the pictures sit and I don't do anything with
them, but I often go through them and grab a few to edit and use.

I would welcome any other advice or tips you can give me.

Thanks!

Ami

http://www.pbase.com/amiable1


I do exactly what you're planning - backup my RAW images to CDs and keep
copies on an external hard drive (or 2, or 3!!). It works fine, although
remember to copy the images over to your internal hard drive for editing in
Photoshop etc (preferably a seperate drive from the one Photoshop lives on).
In my experience, editing images which reside on an external drive is not a
good idea.

Good Luck.