Merlino18

I have a ton of pictures on my computer. How can I get them off? They are on the Nikon software, Photoshop Elements 12 Organizer, and even I Photo. My MAC is running strangely. I need to get them off the computer. I have Dropbox, and someone said to put them on CDs or on flash drives. When you put them in Dropbox, can you delete them from your computer. Don't want to lose anything.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

It sounds like you need something with large storage capacity. If you have an external drive, that would be ideal. If you don't have one, you should - for doing backups.

I'd go with a 1TB/2TB external drive as my first choice, and flash drives as my second choice. If you're going to buy a drive, save yourself some trouble and get one already formatted for a Mac.

traveler90712 Loc: Lake Worth, Fl.

You want to save the originals!! :thumbup:
Dropbox is a computer (a bunch of them). Computers break, businesses go out of business, data is lost when that happens.
The person who said put them on CDs/thumb drives is correct, BUT...... Why not get an external drive, of two and move them there? :thumbup:

stableduck Loc: Chugiak, Alaska

I would buy an external drive to load them on. external drives have come down in price.
I have 2 externals connected to my Imac that I download to then I copy them to the second drive as a backup.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

:thumbup:

amehta Loc: Boston

What they all said: external hard drives pre-formatted for the Mac is your first line of defense. Then, if you want more back-up modes, consider DVDs, flash drives, or online storage.

My suggestion for those is to pick out the "keepers" and zip them up. Transferring fewer bigger files is more efficient, and you can verify the copy by simply listing the contents of the zip file. In the past, I have had situations where I was copying several hundred images to a flash drive and got an error that one or two failed, and I had to open the whole set to figure out which one. It was too much of a pain so I deleted all from the flash drive and did the copy again.

Accelerator

You can get a 1 or 2 terabyte external drive for under $100. Western Digital or Seagate are both good. Then just copy them and once you are sure the copy is good then delete them from your computer. Don't know much about Mac but on a PC if you use the move command instead of the copy command it actually moves them and any mess ups are usually lost so copy not move is the safe way.

bhapke

If you are having trouble with your computer, I strongly suggest you buy THREE external hard drives. One should be at least the same capacity as the internal drive in your computer. This one will be your primary backup. The others can be any size, and will be to store any data that won't fit on the internal drive (you always need two copies, thus two drives).

Get a program called "SuperDuper" or "Carbon Copy Cloner". Either one costs about $30.00 and either has a free trial. These make a bootable copy of your internal hard drive. Both can schedule backups to be automatic when your computer is idle, such as at 2:00 AM (but only the paid versions). If your drive fails, you can hold down the "Option" key when your computer boots and choose the external drive. That way you are back running while waiting for a chance to fix the internal drive. When you get the new internal drive installed, just use the same software to copy from the external drive to the new internal drive, and you will be back where you started without having to reinstall all your programs.

Finally, get an account with an Internet backup program (such as Carbonite, Back Blaze, Mozy, etc.). Use this program to back up all your most important files (photos, tax records, etc). That way if a disaster takes your computer and backup disks, you will not loose everything.

Good Luck!

randyware Loc: Dalton, Ga

I like you had the same fear. I have over a TB of images that I would hate to lose so, I purchased a 3TB external HD and backed up my files. Then, a few week later I read this article (http://digital-photography-school.com/cloud-storage-why-an-external-hard-drive-is-not-enough) and figured if it could happen, it would happen to me. So, I purchase an account with JustCloud to back up my photographs and data. It is worth the few dollars a month to know that they will be backed up and accessible anywhere.

bjprovo Loc: Northeast CT

I have two 3 TB external drives that I store pictures on. One is kept at work so if my house should burn down or be involved in some other disaster, the pictures are still safe in another location.

Bram boy Loc: Vancouver Island B.C. Canada

I take it you can't get any of your photos to go to another source. are they just locked and you can't do any thing . do you have any in iPhoto . see if you can get those on a disk first , if you can , then once you get them on disk . and if iPhoto is now clear . then see if you can get some from where ever else on your Mac . and try to get them into I photo . then if that works . transfer thoes from I photo to disk . don't get to greedy a couple hundered at a time
to disk . untell you get a fair amount out . if that doesent work , take it to a pro geek .

mapster Loc: Wisconsin

I have a question about this backing up with an external hard drive.........does the hard drive have a problem when you go from one type of formatting, say windows 98 to wnindows seven? How does the external hard drive not have a problem down the road because all these operating systems are no longer supported? I am computer illerate, so dummy down for me please!
Thanks

mdorn Loc: Portland, OR

Mac's don't run strangely... they run perfectly. It must be a user related problem. :-) <joke>

Get an external hard drive.

amehta Loc: Boston

What matters is the file system of the hard drive, and whether the computer's OS can handle it. If you used an external HD with Windows 98, the drive probably used FAT16 or FAT32. When you plug the same drive into a Windows 7 machine, it understands both FAT16 and FAT32. If the operating system maintains backward compatibility on file systems, the drive will be fine.

The nice thing with external HD over any disk is that you don't need a separate physical device to use it. The laptop I am using right now does not have a CD/DVD drive. The external HD only needs a USB connection. The other advantage: if two HDs are used for backup, and one of them fails, then it is easy to make a new copy from the good drive. Recovering from disks is much more of a hassle.

mapster Loc: Wisconsin

Thanks Amehta! Appreciate the info, helped me a lot. I don't have an external, partly because I didn't understand the whole process. Guess it is time to dive in!
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