Moving pictures to external drive

[Nebulous]

I've bought a 1TB external drive to copy my photos to as I'm running out of space on my laptop. I'm now struggling to copy them and don't want to make a mistake and potentially lose anything. I'd be grateful if someone could talk me through this.

I bought a laptop about 5 years ago with 1TB hard-disk space. I also had a cloud subscription from Currys and moved all my historic photos to the laptop backed up on the cloud.

Last year I bought a new laptop with 512GB space and a office365 subscription with 1TB cloud. I also got an adobe lightroom / photoshop subscription. I copied all my photos to the new laptop and to one drive. So older photos should have 3 copies old laptop / new laptop / onedrive. Newer photos two, new laptop / onedrive.

I've bought the external SSD to free up space on new laptop as it was fairly full.

I'm trying to copy photos from new laptop to external SSD, but I've found all the photos are not there. Microsoft seems to have been dynamically managing photos to save room on the new laptop by removing them from the laptop and having them in the cloud to download on demand.

When I try to copy from new laptop to SSD it downloads first, then copies them across. It is now refusing to do that, as the new laptop is practically full. I'll try to copy a full year and it will tell me I need 85 GB to do that and I've only got 15.

So now I've got. 4 copies of everything up to mid 2016. On old laptop / new laptop / SSD and one drive.
Two copies of mid 2016- end of 2019. On old laptop and one drive.
Three copies of 2020 to date. On new laptop / one drive and SSD.

I've also copied the lightroom files to the new SSD.

I'm stuck as to what to do next. I could delete the whole of 2015 from my new laptop to free up space to download / copy across some more. I'm thinking that might delete it from one drive as well, which I don't really want. I could attach the SSD to the old laptop and copy the photos across, which might be best.

Any suggestions or thoughts would be welcome. Safety of data and not being too rash would be preferred.

I then need to tell onedrive that my pictures folder now resides on the SSD instead of on the new laptop. Hopefully without it deleting everything and uploading 600 GB of photos again. Is that possible? That would then allow me to delete a lot of the older photos at least from my new laptop.

Once I get everything on the external SSD, what do I do with lightroom? Delete the catalogue on the new laptop and tell it to look for the catalogue on the new SSD?

Thanks for any hints or tips!

 

[Box Brownie]

I think I follow you........

The initial quick thought is don't try to copy such large volume as you describe.

Maybe copy 10GB blocks of files e.g. if a folder named 2015 has 85GB of image files...then on your external drive create a folder "2015".......then from the cloud select blocks/groups of files for download and storage??? In other words don't try to copy whole & large folders!

 

[Jim_Tod]

Buy another few disks, 2 or 4 Tb min. Either leave the other years on the backup system you have. Disconnect from internet and make sure there is actually a copy on each disk and they’re not all pointing to the version on the cloud. Find the settings needing a copy on the physical disk and make sure settings are correct.

it’s not just about spending more, if you have all these copies on full disks then you’re perpetually going to be runnning into a storage wall. You need to get copies of old imagen onto backup disks and free up space for working on your next sets- storage is really quite cheap.

have a look for microsoft synctoy or similar. It’s not a supported app but does a decent job for free of letting you backup or sync folder pairs between disks and is simple to use.