welcome to FT, budding.

i would get one or two 500 gig HD's.

these guys are pretty good at prices:

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/

i'd get one external, one internal(if your computer has room). do nonselective transfer. when you will be off the computer for a while, just copy the whole C(?) drive to the external. unplug it and just let it sit. copy the whole drive to the internal also.

in spite of umpty lebendy gig/second transfer rates, transfer to an external though usb is slow.

as to putting all my data on the computer in the sky, they do sometimes loose data, it costs real money, and at my lousy 5033 kbps upload speed(that's very fast, even for most commercial connections), forever is a long long time.

16 gig chips are now only $32. i would also store the data on a chip. we take the photos, transfer them to the computer, but do not take them off the chip. we label the chips.