iPad back up

I've been searching on how to back up my iPad3 16gb. Constantly running out of space with just a few pics or videos. Somehow pics from my wife's iPhone appear on our MBP , yes we are clueless how they got there. I assume something is sync ing. But nothing from the iPad.
I will be upgrading the MBP today or tommarrow with 10.6, will there be some sync options.

Can I back up or use an external hd for the iPad?,I plan on doing a lot more videos of my son wrestling tournaments, this year.
Is drop box the way to go? I just found this, and reading up on.

The easier I can make my apples work together the more I see it growing. Learning a lot from this forum. Thanks

I don't use dropbox so I can't really comment on that. However, that or some other cloud feature would allow you to access to music, photos, documents with your iPad without actually storing them on the iPad. There are several worthwhile options out there today.

To backup your iPad, you would connect it to your Mac and open iTunes. It performs a backup and syncs whatever data/info you configured. It sounds like maybe you have it set to sync some things that you aren't aware of. Go through all of the tabs in the main window of iTunes (after your iPad is connected) and look over your sync settings. That's probably how it's getting filled up and photos are showing up on there.

After you've backed up the iPad to the Mac, you can back up the Mac to an external drive using the Time Machine software that comes standard on your Mac. That'll keep all your settings for the OSX upgrade.