External hard drives are a near essential item for digital photographers. I use an external drive to backup all my photos and important files off my internal drives. Having more than 1 copy of my files makes me feel better. In case of an emergency I can just grab the external drive and go.

Instead of having a stack of CD’s or DVD’s, and some software to catalog and index them, I just have the external drive. My folder structure for the backup files is exactly the same as what’s on my internal drives. I can easily find what I need AND it’s all in one place.

Since the external drive is USB based I can hook it up to my laptop too. I can backup everything on my laptop or use the external drive to transfer large amounts of data between my 2 computers. If you’d like to get a drive, check out the great deal on the Toshiba unit below.

Toshiba 100 GIG external USB2 HD for only $89.99!