I love Gmail and swear by it as well.

@Phil – Do you use laptops or PCs? I only ask, because a PC hard drive is meant to last about 7 years, especially if you get yourself a couple of nice internal Seagates. My PC is running on a prayer – I have 4 hard drives, all of which are well over 5 years old. I’m not trying to sound snotty, but I hate to see people throw their money away to Best Buy, when they can get themselves a better product for less money.

I actually built my computer (I told you all I was a dork ), and from the gathered experience of other builders, I would say the biggest problem in computers is getting yourself a bad power supply. Once that thing goes, you’ll basically fry your equipment. Yuck.

In any case, if you get a custom built computer and you don’t kick it around too much, it’ll last close to 7 years.

@everyone – I love external hard drives, but be careful with them! If you so much as look at some of those crossways, you’ll suffer data loss. If you leave them in one place, however, they won’t fail as easily.

@tjwriter>> I use Windows XP but I use Opera. But I think I could try and figure out where my favorites are stored with your advice. thanks!

With the addy book being alphabetized, it helps me to look up the appropriate website very quickly, too. I also keep my multiple email accounts in there, as well as relevant info on what accounts (my own nicknames for them) are linked to which other accounts, such as Paypal.

When you have multiple websites, blogs, email accounts, bank accounts, and other accounts, it is vital to be organized.

I’m using Windows XP and for IE favorites, if you go to C:, Documents and Settings, then the user you sign on with, there is a folder called favorites. You can copy that to a flash drive or some other method.

I have AT&T Yahoo DSL, which I believe brings my favorites to me if I log onto another computer using that particular browser program. I did find an xml file on my computer that contained my favorites via this path:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Yahoo!\\Bookmarks.

Hope this type of info helps.

I used to keep a copy of my backup files at my office, but now that I work at home, I’ve lost that benefit of having the files as a second site. (Hmmm, my mother-in-law is just down the street, I should probably leave a copy there. That’d work…)

Mariella,

I truly had no idea, so I just tried copying and pasting via the “explore” function. It worked for me, though you’ll want to test this on one or two unimportant bookmarks first. I have Windows XP. Have no idea if this works on other platforms. Also make sure you have a large enough flash drive to hold everything. Flashdrives are cheap, so you may want to use use just to back up favorites file.

But rather than a flashdrive, I’d recommend a backup hard drive. They’re extremely cheap and enable you to back up whole computer. However, if you have a fire, flood, etc., you’re likely to use the backup drive, too.

For photos, I’m trying Photobucket, which was recommended earlier — Great recommendation — though there may be limitations that I am unaware of.

Misti, a flash drive is really nothing more than a floppy on steroids. Anything that you could have done with a floppy or can do with your hard drive (though the flash does have space limitations) you can do on a flash drive.

Now for my question: I am considering using the Christmas money I get to buy a flash drive since I’ve been reading a lot about them. However, I would like to know if you can edit and re-save the files you save to a flash drive, and also, can those files be deleted one by one?

Thanks in advance to anyone with a flash drive who can answer these questions for me.