you can use it for that but trust me they also go down i have one here i cannot access and it has all kinds of movies on it so it is also best to back them up on cds i believe they are good for 7 years

I have an external hard drive and love it. And thanks I didn't know they could go down also. When I turn my computer off I unplug my external hard drive.

I"ve had cd longer than that that still work

see below

If you are looking to invest in the external drive for just backing up designs then I would suggest 2 alternative options. First back up to cd/dvd if you have a burner. If you don't have a burner you can buy external ones for under $50. Second option is a flash drive you can buy an 8GB flash drive from eBay for under $20. I prefer the cd/dvd option because then I can label the disks as to what kind of design I have on them. Rewritable disks are great for this because you can always add to them. Hope this helped somewhat. *

My Husband has just lost his Music colection which he had rio into MP3's as his external drive crashed. He didn't have any other backup as he had deleted them from his hard drive. His other two externals are working fine, he has backups for these. Murphy's Law no backup - CRASH. I'm Putting my designs on an external then I will burn onto DVD/CD rewriteable. *4u

An external hard drive, a flash drive, cd/dvd, they may all fail one time or another, but do at least use one of the methods to back up your embroidery files. And make a habit of doing it regularly (and frequently - once a year may be regular, but is not very useful).

americangirl, I have an external drive - that I have all my designs on - it frees my PC up - makes it run faster - I also have all these designs backed up - in case for some unknown reason that the external drive crashes. I also use a couple thumbnail drives, too. They are for my embroidery machine - I keep my special designs on them and would like to have a couple more - I love the CD/DVD to back up my designs - but don't always like to use them on a regualar basis - just for when it is needed to copy them back on my PC. All of this cost - but is you have ever had a crash and lost all of your files - with no backup - you would understand why we do what we do. Hehehe!

American Girl , You have great answers but here is a flower for you.