I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

I have a 2TB Passport and two smaller external drives. I use a 17" Dell laptop with Windows 7. Just purchased in July because my previous laptop hard drive failed. I did not want Windows 8 so I really had to shop around for something with W7. I currently have no dedicated office so the work I do is generally while sitting on the sofa. Not optimum but it is what it is. As such, a NAS would not be practical. I know about NAS, they were used in the design department I used to work in. I'm tired of dealing with external drives and remembering to manually back up. It got me in trouble once, it will get me in trouble again. The cloud is really the way I want to go. I didn't know that bells and whistles would go off if I tried to upload 30Gb of photos. I'll contact my ISP and see what they suggest. Thanks. Jodi-

I will guess that the first step of the iCloud backup is to calculate how much data you need to back up and when it saw that there was not enough space it reported the error without backing up any of the photos. I don't have an iPhone, but can you connect it to your Windows computer? If so, you should be able to copy the photos from the phone to your computer. When I plug my Android phone into my computer, I open 'Computer' and can see the phone as a storage device. From there, I can copy the photos to Windows (my pictures folder) or delete the ones that I don't want. In your case, you could copy them to the external hard drive that you mentioned. If you already have a Photobucket account, can't you create an album of your Niece's birthday party, upload those pictures to it and send the link to that album to your sister? This post was edited by pkponder on Fri, Jan 2, 15 at 12:29

A long time ago, I did a Mint Mate install(actual install, not live) onto a 16GB Gigaware USB flash drive. It booted slow as molasses and the first time running apps was just as slow. It ran fine afterward though. I considered getting a faster flash drive such as a SanDisk Extreme, but it wasn't it my budget at that time. I seem to remember playing around with bcd.exe but my memory is short. Some day I'll have to give EasyBCD a try. In the meantime, GRUB works for me. An extraordinarily boring (and embarrassing, mostly because I flubbed customizing GRUB2 because I'm too lazy to learn to use it properly right now) video of my installing Mint Mate alongside Windows 10 in a virtual machine... I suppose the point is that they can, at least sometimes, live happily beside one another. I was really expecting Mint Mate to offer to "install alongside windows" and auto-partition but it did not. Don't some other Ubuntu based distros do that? Or is it just full blown Ubuntu? Anyway, after all my stumbling, doing it incorrectly, redoing etc., Grub now reads exactly the way I want, remembers the previous boot choices etc. ... That's just a virtual machine though. I wouldn't suggest others try it on their real machines. I suppose if one were to practice setting up a dual boot system, a virtual environment would be the safe place to learn, right? BTW, I used Oracle's VirtualBox in the above videos. Free and open source. Oops, I just read the warning on the VirtualBox download page: "Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported!" Oh well, seems to run fine for me.