question about laptop and space/storage

[HopefulM]

Hi,
I find that I'm shifting more and more images to the external hard drive, and although it clears space on the laptop, I'm finding that space is being eaten up anyway...

Is my laptop storing another set of these images somewhere I don't know about? If it is, can I stop it doing this in the future?

I ask because I could have maybe 10 or 12 files of images (ranging between 2-8GB per file) on the laptop before having to save on the external hdd, now I can only store one or two... and it's driving me bonkers! :|

The hd on the laptop is 100GB, please don't ask me anything too complicated about it as I'll have no idea (sorry ) unless you give me an idiots guide about how to find it...

please help

thanks
M
x

 

[HopefulM]

no one any ideas?

 

[Tringa]

You said that you are 'shifting' images from your laptop to your external hard drive, but is it possible you are actually copying the images to the external HDD?

If so, then the images will still be on the laptop hard drive and therefore no space on the laptop will be freed up.

You said the hard drive on the laptop is 100Gb. Is that correct? I'm asking because, a long time ago 100Gb would have been quite a large drive, but now it is very small.

However, if you really are shifting(ie moving) images from the laptop to the external hard drive, I can't explain why the laptop appears to have little free space, but can say that is very risky procedure.

If anything happens to the external hard drive then you photos will be lost.

Dave

 

[piggin]

Remember to empty your recycle bin when you delete an item.
If you don't, the items will continue to take up space.

 

[fazer]

I ran defrag recently, having moved and deleted many photos and files over the months. Recovered about 20 gig. Should be done on a regular basis but takes hours to complete. Best run overnight.

 

[neil_g]

I ran defrag recently, having moved and deleted many photos and files over the months. Recovered about 20 gig. Should be done on a regular basis but takes hours to complete. Best run overnight.

Defrag doesn't recover disk space it simply defragments file segments. The latest versions of windows all defrag in the background anyway so it's a pointless procedure.

I would suspect the files are being copied and the originals still on the laptop.

 

[Mikesphotaes]

Are you copying the photos to your external drive (hopefully you are because if you cut and paste, if anything goes wrong, you will lose your photos)?

If so, are you deleting your original images then emptying your Recycle Box?

Download CCleaner, it's free, and run this to clean up your computer.

You may also have lots of Restore points, you can use the cleaner to pick and choose what one you want to keep.

 

[-RV-]

What OS are you using ?

For Windows I use a utility called WinDirStat. It gives you a visual overview of what is taking up space on your machine and allows you to drill down to find out more detail.

 

[HopefulM]

thanks for the replies, and in answer :

yes, it's a fairly old laptop, but I'm not ready to say goodbye to it yet...

I copy the relevant image files to the HDD, check they're there, then delete from laptop, and empty the recycle bin

using vista business as an os.

Neil, if they are being stored somewhere else as well, where would I look for them?

thanks
x

 

[RobertP]

Hope you are copying them to more than one place. hard drives do go wrong and backups are essential.

Hard to say what is eating the space on your hard drive. I take it you are moving these files about yourself using windows explorer to cut and paste and not some picture managing program or something?

What make and model laptop is it in case there are any clues there?

 

[tdodd]

What OS are you using ?

For Windows I use a utility called WinDirStat. It gives you a visual overview of what is taking up space on your machine and allows you to drill down to find out more detail.

I like Treesize for doing a similar thing. There is a free version available here - http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

Here's a sample of the output for my laptop, which has the drive partitioned into C: and D:....

The 36GB of "System Volume Information" on the D: drive is virtually all system recovery backups of data files (pictures, documents etc) which I really don't need versioned on this drive, so I've just wiped the whole lot and reclaimed 36GB of disk space. There's another ~10GB of stuff in the recycle bin, which I could also dump if I liked, at least for now.

And if I drill down into the "Pictures" folder I can see what I've got lurking in there, and so on.