Memory cards fail and can be misplaced or damaged easily.

I bought an external hard drive. I move my pictures over to that after a while. I also back them up to a DVD twice a year and store that in my bank box.

I can fill one 4gb memory card at one sporting event. I would have to buy a lot of cards!

First question is why do you pay to have those burned to a CD when you have the software built right into your computer to do the ob very easily? Your choice of course and I was not intending that as a rude comment.

You fail to mention the size of the memory card so we cannot judge how many CDs would be needed. You can buy blank CDs in 5 25 50 and 100 packs in Target and many other places and create you own CD collection.

You could of course keep those memory cards filled and keep buying new. If this is an upscale camera and you are buying the faster camera cards then perhaps using CDs might prove cost effective.

What I think is that the girl at the store is a clever salesperson who saw an opportunity to make more money by continually selling you memory cards than she would selling you a bulk pack of CDs. If you have a DVD burner in your computer, a single disc will hold around 5GB of photos. In fact even if you don't have a DVD burner, you can buy a good quality external one for about $50. You can get a hundred pack of blank discs for about $25. Do the math: 25 cents a disc to store about 5 GB of photos, versus how much for a 4GB memory card?

or you can buy flash thumb drives now for very cheap also and move them to a thumb drive for storage they come in large capacity now also if you did not want to go the external hard drive route.

but I agree I would not keep buying memory cards rather than put them on some type of storage media, do you have a dvd burner in your pc? or cd burner? it is very easy to do. It is about impossible to do any kind of labeling with memory cards too where as with a dvd or cd you can label what is on them.

I have an external hard drive and my PC and everything is on both. It's not likely both will go out at the same time. The loss of my travel pictures doesn't mean anything to anyone except me. I do know that when I buy a new computer I need to check if my Iomega HD will be compatible with the new PC. This happened to me years ago and I took my back ups to a shop that transferred my stuff. I always save my unedited photos from the card and my edited ones. That saved me from losing all the pictures from one of my trips.

Thanks everybody. I feel even more computer illerate that I did before. I have no idea if I can burn a dvd or cd on my 5 year old Gateway computer - guess I'll have to learn if I can do it and how. The only thing I do on my computer is email and of course search around, but honestly, I know nothing about burning cd/dvd's or external hard drives. Nothing. I can learn, though I just needed to know where to start and your comments have been very helpful. Thanks!

Leaf, I love music so I learned to edit music CDs, picking my favorite songs off of the originals CDs and burning them to a CD and you can put more on instead if the 12 or so that comes on a music CD. Later when we bought a car with a Bose system with a 6 CD changer I learned to convert the songs to MP3's. Some times it was frustrating, but mostly fun and I love results. Over 220 songs on one CD. Music heaven. BTW I haven't put photos on CDs, I just put leave them in a folder and print off the ones I like.

if you get a usb memory card reader ( or you may have one built into your pc) you can really easily move your pics from that memory card to the pc and or to cd or dvd. I am sure your pc has a burner on it, tell us what model the pc is and we can find that out for you.

you plug the usb card reader into a usb port on the pc and put the memory card into the appropriate slot in the reader, when it opens on the pc you can choose to view the contents, once you have the folder open and can see the individual pictures you can move them individually or you can just choose to move the entire folder over to a cd.
Right click on the folder or the individual pic and select copy to then your cd drive, of course you have to have a cd in the drive to burn to.
Here is another method to do it
How to Burn Photos to a CD
another good tutorial with many options covered
How to Transfer Your Digital Photos

Using Memory Card Readers
and always always click on the safely remove icon in the systray by the clock before removing anything from the usb port select to remove then wait till it is safe.

Thanks, Ravencajun! Great tutorials for me. I really apreciate evrybody's replies. I'm all set to go now :)