On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:31:29 -0500, Ami wrote:

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

It should work as simply and reliably as an internal drive. Basically,
some of the electronics has been repackaged in the external enclosure. The
one main kicker is that an external drive is considerably slower than an
internal unit. Firewire is much faster than USB2.