Storage Media question :)

Lizbetty

Sorry it's a boring one, but I'm finally getting the hundreds of photos of my kids and my husband's works docs backed up onto disk, or I will once I've bought the things! (Not very knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts, etc, unfortunately)

I'm about to place an order with Viking Direct for 4.7gb CD+RW discs, but they vary so much in price and I don't know if it's these I need. The photos also include some short video clips, My Documents file is almost 2gb so I figured these would be best.

As I don;t really know what I'm doing...I wonder if anyone can advise if these type are ok for this purpose please?

Many thanks for your help,

Lucy

superscaper

Should be fine, but I'm guessing you meant DVD not CD (CD's only store up to 700 MB) and presumably you have a DVD writer in your PC. http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=597170

Lizbetty

Oh...ermmmmmm. I'm not sure about that one. I know I have a rewriter of sorts built in, I've only ever used it for copyin/playing cds. If I may ask a possibly even thicker question, is there any way I can tell whether it would be a dvd writer too please?

Thanks, Lucy

sleep2much

when you click on my computer it sould say DVD RW next to the drive, or written on the front of the drive itself a cube like picture with RW in it & dvd in tiny writing under it.

If it just says cd rewritable it's the wrong type of drive

Lizbetty

Oh bugg-er. Thanks for that! I guess I only have a cd rw then. So I'll have to split down my files a bit, which is a bit of a nightmare - I'm scared to death of losing pics of my kids (which I know I should have backed up as I went along instead of saving up almost 3 years worth..........)

I don't suppose there's an easier way round it is there please? (Just difficult to do owt involving concentration with 9 months old pulling at the wires...:rolleyes: )

Thanks again

Lucy

sleep2much

only to get a dvd RW off ebay for about £15-20 or a new one £25 upwards from pc world and the like....whatever format you decide to save them on, you can guarentee it will be old hat in 10 years.

BillScarab

Well 2gb will fit onto 3 CDs without any problem. Your video clips will be the biggest files so depending on how big they are you could put all of them on one disc and then split your photo's across another couple.

Do you have a laptop or desktop PC? A DVD writer for a desktop is around £20 or less nowadays and they are easy to fit if you want to get everything onto one disc.

Lizbetty

We have a desktop pc. I'm all for making things as easy as possible with 2 rugrats wanting to distract me from what I'm doing, lol!

I'll have a look on Ebay, thanks for the tip. Is there anything in partic I should avoid/look for please? Sorry, as I said I'm a newbie to all this (it does scare me a bit in fact)

Lucy

sleep2much

there is some guy selling lots of dvd writers for £5...but he wants £7 postage, I guess they come in golden envelopes.

penrhyn

You may find that backing up to DVD is only good as a short term solution.
In the longer term it would probably better for you to consider purchasing an external hardrive, they simply plug into a USB port and appear on your system as an additional drive (assuming XP or later).
You can then simply drag and drop the files you wish to back up, without having to fiddle around with DVDs.
If you like you can buy software to automate the process, or use windows backup.

Something like this.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-320GB-Essential-External/dp/B000EXZB02/ref=pd_bbs_5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1195059144&sr=8-5

superscaper

sleep2much wrote: »

but he wants £7 postage, I guess they come in golden envelopes.

:rotfl: :rotfl:
Or floated in on swans guided by a voluptuous virgin and presented with a personally written song.