My laptop is telling me I’m running out of data memory. Ive got a load of photos on it and have been told an external hard drive would be a better place to store them liberating memory on the computer.

Can anyone suggest something on amazon (with a link) that would best suit my needs.

Couch any advice in terms your grandmother would like.

buy 2 of them and keep them in separate locations.
no point in having just one copy on just 1 external back-up if it fails (and they do)

Bit like wot mrSmith says. It’s not ‘better’ to have them on an external hard drive per se unless you’re really really full up, but it does make sense to keep a backup of all those valuable photos.

Unless you have loads of PCs on a network in your house then you only need a USB driven hard disk (ie. not a NAS drive attached for everyone to share).

I’ve got a dinky Western Digital one like this one which I’ve never had a problem with.

Might be worth burning stuff off to a DVD as well, maybe giving a copy to your folks or something so it’s in a diffreent location if you’re really paranoid about losing stuff.

[edit this repeats BE’s post, but it took me a while to type it..]

Clear up your PC first, with something like Ccleaner or TFC, to give yourself a bit of breathing space to decide what you really want/need….

Then decide what you actually want to do, do you want to just store the data or be able to access it from a safe place.
Pure storage: Just burn the data to DVD….Though a poster mentioned that they were worried about the life of a writeable DVD’s and used USB memory stick instead, it seems a ‘tad’ over the top. A well stored DVD should easily last 25 year if not longer (stored in a case, in a decent/stable environment) maybe up to 100 years but as they’ve not be around long, this is all theoretical… The point being a DVD backup is a useful/valid storage media if you don’t need to access it much.
External drives… lots about, lots of different case sizes and volume wise & portable, though this portability means they are liable to being abused (dropped) & so potentially damaged, though “tough” version are available. Great for temporary storage/portability & instant access to data but not really meant for indefinite storage.

NAS drive, basically an external drive plugged into you network (or router), that will be left in place. These can come with dual drive to allow huge data storage or backup option through using “raid” format. Simple “raid” options allow a mirror of the data to be stored on both drives and so if one breaks, you still have all of the data on the 2nd & popping a replacement drive in the NAS will automatically re-create the data onto the new drive. Depending on how you want it setup, these can be accessed by any machine on your network, or over the internet if you want.

Do bear in mind that hard drive prices have escalated enormously due to flooding in Thailand, so your probably going to be paying a more than you would have a couple of months back or even in 9 months time (suspected ‘shortest’ time for a recovery of the market). Just worth mentioning..

eh? bought a 500gb one from Lidl on Thursday for £29 – is that expensive?

Nope, sound a fricken bargain though I’m not aware of current external drive prices, but stocks of pre-bought kit as per what Lidl/Aldi specialize in (bulk buy a single item [no doubt been on a boat for 8 weeks] and sell it cheap). Though the actually hdd spec’d within in it is no doubt a more basic model (disc speed/cache size), than you’d want for a laptop/pc.

it’s a Toshiba spec didn’t seem any more basic than the one I just stuck in my PS3

McMoonter – if you have one nearby try Lidl. A mate had told me they were selling them last week so I checked online and went down to my local store on Thursday but when I got there at about 11ish they didn’t even have any on display (or an empty section where they’d been or advertised anywhere at all inside the store) so I asked the manager, they had them right enough but he’d stashed them away in the storeroom for some reason.

My laptop is telling me I’m running out of data memory

What’s it actually saying?

Sorry folks my phone line died in the storm. When I get properly back online, I’ll get this sorted. L
Neigh local Lidl nor Aldi had any of those budget external hard drives left.

got loads of these in work as backups, they have been fine.

Iomega prestige, good thing is it runs the power off the usb.