Running out of Hard Drive Space?

What's the best choice?

In my opinion, add another hard drive. Hard drives these days are very inexpensive. And all computers are able to support multiple hard drives. And even a lay person can install an extra hard drive - just Google "installing a second hard drive" & last time I tried, I got 31,900,000 hits in 0.8 seconds.

CD's & DVD's are great archival media. But these days, even CD's are getting too small for most purposes. The best use is for each time you come to take photos off your digital camera, make a copy to a CD, write on it with a Sharpie the date, contents etc and use those as your "negatives" (remember those?). You should still do your regular back ups on top of that - you can never have enough back ups. But say you have a 250 GB hard drive, that's roughly 357 CD's worth of data. Yikes.

It's easy to have 30 GB of music, which, even if you backed up to DVD (which I recommend you do as well as a "hard copy"), is still 7 DVD's worth. A lot of work, which most people will nto be bothered with.

So when it comes to making room, most times removing files or putting them on other media in order to make more space is like emptying a swimming pool with a bucket.

Just remember, if you DO get another hard drive to hold your ever-increasing need for storage space for all your stuff, make sure that it too is backed up. Hard drives are a pretty fragile mechanical device and unless you have a back up system to ANOTHER hard drive or other form of media, you could LOSE IT ALL! I cannot stress enough the importance of having MULTIPLE COPIES of all your data. Back it up to DVD. Back it up to a removable hard drive. Put stuff on CD's, thumb drives, just do not every have only one copy in one place of any data unless you don't mind losing it.