Calling the experts

hylax

Can anyone help me? Being computer illiterate I tried SyncToy thinking it would be simple. I clicked synchronize, the program did not complete and both my hard drive and external drive were full. I have formatted the external drive but I cannot find what is filling the pc hard drive.

hc25036

Use Windirstat (http://windirstat.info/) to see what is taking the space on your drive. If you need help after that, someone from here will be by....

Strider590

You do not mention whether the hard drive was full in the first place.

Can you confirm?

hylax

The hard drive was only about half full. The bulk was 54GB of music. Total capacity of hard drive is 160GB.

System

Got any games on there?

hylax

No games. Really just music and photographs.

isofa

Did you sync again to the same drive but a different folder by mistake - ending up with SyncToy duplicating everything on the same drive just to a different location? Have a look through the SyncToy setup and your "folder pairs".

hylax

I uninstalled SyncToy at the time to give some space on the hard drive. I will re-install.
Any instruction please make it simple. Thank you for your help.

esuhl

I had a few problems with SyncToy appearing to complete successfully, but not actually copying all files. Free File Sync is easy to use and very reliable:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

To synchronise two folders, you set a "left" one, and a "right" one (i.e. the source and destination folders), run a compare, check that the settings are correct (e.g. if a file exists in the "right" folder but not the "left", should the file be ignored or deleted...), then click the big "Synchronize..." button.

Once you've got the settings as you want them, you can save a batch job (via the Advanced menu). This creates an file icon that you can double-click to run the same synchronisation process at a later date.

Hopefully it's fairly self-explanatory....

hylax

Using Windirstat I took the risk of deleting what I thought was the duplicated music. So far my itunes seems to be ok. Now I have space on my hard drive. Grateful thanks for all the help.