Laptop & Bernina Software

[RoseSews]

To save on space I put my designs on an external harddrive that I bought at Walmart for about $70 It has 320 gb of space.

Don't trust those cheap external hard drives. They are fine, but make sure you also have your files backed up on another medium like CDs or something because it is very common for those hard drives to crash. I learned the hard way and lost two years of photographs that were on an external hard drive and not backed up on anything else. Now I have a better external hard drive (more reliable brand), but any can crash. Just don't keep important files on only one storage medium.

[Senior Bag Lady]

Rose,
Can you tell us the brand of external hard drive you now use?
I have a Western Digital external hard drive and have been told it is one of the best.

[RoseSews]

Mine is a Kingwin Elite and I don't know if it's one of the best or not, but I got my first one from Walmart and it was fairly cheap. When it crashed and I took it to two different computer places to try to retrieve my files they both told me that the brand that it was crashes more than most, but I don't remember what brand it was. It didn't have an on/off switch, which meant it was running (disk spinning) whenever the computer was booted up. My new one has an on/off switch and I can leave it turned off except when I want to save files to it or retrieve them and that puts less wear on the drive. But none of them are 100% reliable and that's why you need to keep important files also on another medium. I use my external hard drive only for backup and the files on it are also on my computer. If your internal hard drive is too small, you can get a larger internal hard drive and just have your program files on the hard drive you now have and put all of your data files on the new internal hard drive. That's what I did with my computer, which also has the Windows XP operating system. HTH.