External hard drives?

[donutsweeper]

Appealing to my flist for information here :)

I know next to nothing about computers. I would like to get an external hard drive or a zip drive or something that I can back up my files with. I would be backing up word docs, photos and a bunch of .avi files (tv shows and movies). Anyone have any suggestions as to what device would work best for this? Any info- like what brands are good or which ones should be avoided or what storage size is ideal would be appreciated.

Comments

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent, that's good to know. I really want to be able to use it .or more than one computer,

[kateri-e.livejournal.com]

Yeah I store media and old papers and research on it instead of backing up my whole computer and I can access that material from multiple computers and load files from multiple computers. It depends on how you set it up. You can set them to 'sync' so that when you hook it up it looks for any aditions or just use it as a storage device.