I dragged and dropped all my files from my PC hard drive to the external hard drive. It is basically another hard drive only portable.

Can you do that with the units? I got the idea that the copied them (like copying and pasting)

If I have saved the odd photo I save directly to both my PC hard drive then my External hard drive. If I am saving quite a few I wait until they are are saved on my PC then drag and drop them across.

What i ment was when you insert the card into the portable storage unit, does it copy the images and leave a copy on your card or does it efectively cut and paste them.

Ollie, yes it copies the pics, which means you will still have the originals on your media card.

This situation leaves me with having to format my C/flashcards via the camera, whereas my normal workflow is to format via the PC after tranfer to PC harddrive and DVD.

Thats what i was thinking, i will end up reformatting my cards after copying the photos over as it is alot faster than going thorugh and deleating each one. But surely it damages the card in the long run.

Ollie no doubt people will have conflicting ideas as to what is best, so I'm not advocating any specific way.

What I do and have done for the past 4-5 years is to format via the PC, initially as Fat, but since the advent of larger cards as Fat 32.

I've never ever used the delete function, the main reason being that on my first major Digicam, the Minolta D7, deleting images still left the folders on disk.

I carried on with the same procedure when upgrading to the Canon 300D in Sept 2003.

Have never had a card failure, other than a Microdrive. since then have only ever used C/flash.
My original 100Mb cards are still in continual use by my son, who appears to have laid claim to the Minolta.

Harry

Ollie

A trick I have done is to create a holding file on my PC and my External Hard Drive. I transfer everything off my card into that file on my PC and name it to anything that will allow you to recognise that file at a later date. I then reformat my card on my PC. (i have been doing this for a few years and still my cards are ok). You can now go through the orginal photos and delete those that are no good. I then drag and drop whats left to my External Hard Drive then go back to my PC and edit the photos from the original ones. Place the edited ones in their respective folders then drag and drop them onto the External drive as well.

After you have finished you are left with all the original photos you want on both hard drives to keep, which allows you to edit them differently at a later date when you learn new tricks with your editing programme.

Reformatting the card will not do it any harm whatsoever as it is a completely solid state device with no moving parts. If you delete individual files off the card then the file allocation table (hence FAT) gets very complicated as "holes" are left in the table. Reformatting the card gives a clean start and the devices that read and write to the card don't have to work around the gaps. This makes life easier for the devices (camera/PC/external storage device) to work with the card as they are not reading fragmented files.

I am in the habit of reformatting the card every time after I have transferred the files onto my PC. I also favour reformatting the card in the camera rather than on the PC. I consider it is more reliable to format the card using the device that has to write to it, less risk of subtle differences in the formatting causing errors and corruption.

Duncan.

...and with modern cameras it only takes a few seconds so there's no reason not to, as far as I can see.

My Sony S85 from a few years ago needs about half a minute to format a 128Mb card but with the Canon 20D it takes longer to acces the 'format' option than to do the actual formatting.

In camera formatting gets my vote too!

The reason i ask about formatting is i will be going travelling and taking an external storage unit with me and copying the photos onto there when i run out of card space. I will then format the card on the camera as it is alot faster and uses less battery juice to do that than delete individual files.
Thank you for clearing up that point about formatting not damaging the card.