I purchased an external hard drive as a back up for my system, but I was also hoping to find a way to store my billions of photos and designs somewhere else so they wouldn't take up all my computer's storage. But now I'm worried if I delete files on my computer, they will also be deleted on the hard drive the next time I back up my computer. Will this happen automatically? Or so I have to manually delete them? If this is the case, can I get a better suggestion for how to store photos so they don't take up my PC's hard drive?

Hi
 
I have three externals and clean up my system often, but I physically put mine across rather
thank backing up, I just throw the folder on to the external and delete from my system.
 
However... I also had one buffalo drive, that ate the lot, it just died on me, and the reason was
un-plugging it without shutting down my computer, although I did recover, it took days to do that
and I did loose a lot of files, so be careful with them.
 
I keep my backup for recovery on my real drive, as I have oodles of space because I put everything on
externals, or I would have been out of space along time ago
 
Usually backups have different numbers and dates, but if you are talking photographs, just throw the files
over as you go, or simply save to the external rather than the internal, making sure that my system stays nice and fast and clean as possible.
 
Others though might do thinks very different or have better advice, I kind of bimble along being me
 
Hugs Moonie

Angela, it sounds to me like what this one external drive is to perform double duty i.e. to function as your back up AND a place for your large collection of images etc. This is a bad idea. If you move your image files from your internal hard drive to the new external hard drive, that will be become your ONLY copy of these files, and depending on how you have set up your backing up software, you could delete this files without meaning to.
 
External hard drives for back up purposes need to have that role alone. This is not negotiable if you want your files to be safe. Doreen and Moonie have detailed their ways, here's mine.
 
I have an iMac but you can set up a similar architecture if you have a PC. I have recent images (last three years) on my internal hard drive for quick access. All of the others are stored on a USB connected external hard drive. So, these two drives are my primary storage drives. For backup, I have two Thunderbolt connected external hard drives and I use Time Machine to back up both of my primary storage drives. If Time Machine has access to two drives, like in my scenario, it will alternate backing up between them. In any case, I always have three copies of any file, one on one of my primary storage drives and two back ups. In addition, since I use Lightroom extensively for image management, I have my Lightroom catalogue backed up to Dropbox. In time I will also start to copy certain images to the cloud in order to get them off my premises. Always something else to do ...
 
Hope this helps.
 
Cheers,
 
 
Rosanne

Only current images are on my hard-drive - all the old images, cards, and photographs are on my external hard-drive.

You're a brave woman, Angela!   Personally, I back up everything twice, always. Having had the experience, back in the day, of the disk that my then-incomplete doctoral thesis was on spontaneously decide not to work ever again and, luckily, having an up-to-date backup sitting on my desk made me value backing up absolutely everything. Hard drives are relatively cheap and the anxiety and distress that file loss can cause is not worth the "saved" money.
 
Just my two cents, I'll stop now.  
 
Cheers,
 
 
Rosanne
 
Quote from Angela_134247 on Jan 25^th, 2015, 6:05pm:

If you join here and pay the $30.00 a year membership, they have a print file storage and retrieval system where you can download any images you upload to their site to your new computer should your old computer crash. I love that about this place and it is well worth the $30.00 membership just for that. Plus I have a chance to sell some of my work as art prints.  
 
http://www.theuntappedsource.com/  
 

I like google drive and google photo.
drive - super easy to organize photos in folders, access on multiple devices, free space etc.    
photo - automatic upload to the cloud, free space

Between companies going out of business, hackers and piracy, I will not store my art files out in 'space' where I give up complete control on how they are stored and who has access.
 
External drives are cheap and a brilliant solution. I know from recent experience in fire evacuation that they are simple to remove from the computer and take with me.
 
Just my view