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

Gardengal: I'll admit my words included a bit of exaggeration, but monopoly is as monopoly does. Is Amazon there yet: do they want to crush their competitors (bad), or just keep doing better than the competition (good)? So far personally I think they are mostly on the "good" side, but things change so I'm not guaranteeing my support forever. Angela & others: A company can outsource execution of something (a component of a product, or delivery to customer's door) but that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for keeping their word. When I one-click, I expect the product to show up as Amazon promised -- correct product, good shape, on time. If it doesn't, I'm mad. What I like about Amazon is they DO take responsibility by offering refunds, etc if something went wrong in the delivery chain, all the way to me. I'm aware of efforts they are trying to deal with porch pirates -- lock boxes, that weird service where they get to enter your home -- but personally I haven't needed that yet. So overall I'm still a fan. Ten, 20 years from now? Who knows.

If she already has her bookmarks, passwords, etc. straightened out it's probably too late but... If you can locate her old Firefox profile on her Windows disk, you could probably copy her profile files to her new Firefox profile on her Linux disk. When I mount my Windows installation from within Linux, I find mine here: /media/chugger/Acer/Users/richard/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles (chugger is my Linux username, Acer is the label of the Windows partition, richard is my Windows username) If there's more than one profile directory, I would assume it to be the last created. On the running Linux installation you can just go to "Help" -> "Troubleshooting information" and Firefox will point it out to you. Alternately, you could just copy specific files from the old Windows Firefox profile to the new Linux Firefox profile. Bookmarks and history are stored in places.sqlite. Passwords requires two files: key4.db and logins.json https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data On my main computer, I put Linux on an M.2. nvme and moved Windows from a one terrabyte spin drive to an inexpensive 120 gig Kingston SSD. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N6JQS8C (It was $19.99 when I bought it) Windows boots quickly on the SSD. Probably as fast as my Linux does on the faster M.2. nvme. 120 gig is more than enough for a boot drive as long as you use another drive for data. If at some point in the future you get restless and want to play, and possibly impress your wife, you might stick a small SSD in her machine to use as a boot drive. And use the 500 gig spin drive for data. I just got a new bedroom computer. I had trouble getting remote desktop working. After a couple frustrating days I got it working and quickly backed it up. And... it felt good. Probably better than it would have if it had come easy. The bedroom computer, shown in the window looks almost exactly like the main computer but... that's just me. I like simple. :-)