Good luck Wizard and I hope everything works out with your Flickr account and downloading your pics if you choose to do so, I do the same thing as Mojave- I keep all original photos downloaded from my cameras on local hard drives in RAW format. For online stuff, I reduce resolution to get a smaller size picture since rarely do people print out pics anymore. Most pic viewing is online. I usually post pics at photo sites as high quality JPEGS. TIFF format sometimes has slightly higher quality.
In fact, what I've done lately is to backup all my computer data files on two external hard drives. And I've totally removed a lot of these data files from the computer entirely to clean up the hard drive and make it operate and run faster. Also, I'm a firm believer that computer maintenance is essential. I defragment the hard drive about once a month using either the built in defrag, or a software program called Diskeeper. Our main desktop computer still runs WinXP. I just upgraded my laptop to Window 8.1, but I have a partitioned disk. So I still need to back up external data to an external drive. And we use the iPad generally when we travel.
I've never been "flagged" by Flickr, but I don't have nude shots there anyway. Virtually all my hot springs pictures don't have people in them.