Enz01

I have a few 250gig Lachie Hard Drives, I know 250gigs isn't much but they're really portable. You also can pick up a 16gig flash drive / aka junk drive. I've seen them as cheap as 34 bucks. Actually a 4gig one might do you fine if its just photos. But then again if you want to be really cheap you could pick up a bunch of DVD-R Dvds from bestbuy a package of 50 might cost you around 20$ but you have a hard copy and you can write on the DVD the dates / description of whats on the DVD. Since you shot a lot of photos at the last JDM Up's you could have stored all the photos on the DVD & you have a hard copy as well as a copy on external DVD's and or junk drives.

EconoBox

+1 on carbonite software
it comes free on most Acer laptops

I also have a 500GB external HD that holds a copy of all my files. My laptop is backed up to my desktop, carbonite, and the external hd. There are a lot of ways to do it so just come up with something you can afford and feel comfortable with.