Hard Drive Nearly Full

PJB

Hi All

My C: partition (titled OS_Install) is nearly full, 1.1 GB free of 132. The (titled Data) has 48GB free of 88.3 GB.

I think there are alot of duplicate photo's, documents etc and possibly some Old Windows back up/copies which I believe are formed when you install a new copy of Windows - Which I have not done but I had on the previous laptop that I linked to this when I first set it up so it copied everything over.

What is the best way to go about clearing duplicates, old windows files, zip safely photo's & generally freeing up space!!!

Figment

Please clarify - 1.1GB of 132........ what?

Version and edition of Windows you're using?

chib

In my experience, when dealing with various clients and such it can be a very time consuming task clearing up duplicate files and such.

Do you have an external drive? If not, could you borrow one?

What I'd recommend is backing up any documents, photos, music and such that are important to you and then formatting the system and installing a clean build of windows.

It's a good housekeeping excercise, will likely speed up your system also if you haven't done it in a while.

fwor

There are quite a few disk cleanup tools around such as ccleaner, but IMO the easiest starting point is the one that has been built into Windows since XP onwards.

I'd also agree with chib - if you want to get the maximum benefit, you need to be going through your files, backing up just the ones you want and then doing a clean install of Windows.

PJB

Figment wrote: »

Please clarify - 1.1GB of 132........ what?

Version and edition of Windows you're using?

Think you have misread, I said 1.1 GB of 132 GB free.

Windows 7 Home Premium.

Re-read and I put the free at the end and had put a full stop in between the C: & comments so you read it correctly, my apologies.

PJB

chib wrote: »

In my experience, when dealing with various clients and such it can be a very time consuming task clearing up duplicate files and such.

Do you have an external drive? If not, could you borrow one?

What I'd recommend is backing up any documents, photos, music and such that are important to you and then formatting the system and installing a clean build of windows.

It's a good housekeeping excercise, will likely speed up your system also if you haven't done it in a while.

System has not slowed that much until today. I do have an external hard drive and I agree that it does sound very time consuming and extremely tedious!

fwor wrote: »

There are quite a few disk cleanup tools around such as ccleaner, but IMO the easiest starting point is the one that has been built into Windows since XP onwards.

I'd also agree with chib - if you want to get the maximum benefit, you need to be going through your files, backing up just the ones you want and then doing a clean install of Windows.

Used disk cleaner but for the long run am going to have to sort!

Have 27gb of photo's which I don't mind compressing and copying to external hard drives but bit worried about losing them. Any advice?

Also if I do a clean install won't it just back up the stuff on there and also I'll have to reinstall all the prog's that I use - which will also take ages and be very tedious!

Is there any decent software that finds and merges or deletes duplicates?

Avoriaz

If you do go for a full reinstall, you may want to reconsider how you allocate your available disk space.

I have a 500gb laptop running Win7.

I split the disk it into three partitions as in the image below.

1) Windows and Programmes
2) All my data, letters, photos etc
3) My music videos which are very large files

I don't store any personal data on Partition 1. I use ccleaner to tidy up that partition.

I manually maintain the other partitions.

The storage allocation as below works for me. You would need to work out what will work for you.

PJB

Avoriaz wrote: »

If you do go for a full reinstall, you may want to reconsider how you allocate your available disk space.

I have a 500gb laptop running Win7.

I split the disk it into three partitions as in the image below.

1) Windows and Programmes
2) All my data, letters, photos etc
3) My music videos which are very large files

I don't store any personal data on Partition 1. I use ccleaner to tidy up that partition.

I manually maintain the other partitions.

The storage allocation as below works for me. You would need to work out what will work for you.

Thanks

How do I partition like that? Will it ask me when I do the install?

googler

Download WinDirStat and run it to see exactly what's using your HDD space.

Once you know what files and what type of files you have, you can proceed to organise them

You need more than one copy of your data for safety, so if you're deleting it from your HDD, you need (say) two external drives to copy it to - twice - so that even if one external drive fails, you have the other.

If we're talking about a desktop machine here, not a laptop, you could look at what you have in terms of secondary drive bays and cabling within the machine. If you only have one drive at present, you could install a secondary and/or third/fourth drive, and use these as backup stores for your data.

How much are you willing or able to spend on this exercise....?

PJB

googler wrote: »

Download WinDirStat and run it to see exactly what's using your HDD space.

Once you know what files and what type of files you have, you can proceed to organise them

You need more than one copy of your data for safety, so if you're deleting it from your HDD, you need (say) two external drives to copy it to - twice - so that even if one external drive fails, you have the other.

If we're talking about a desktop machine here, not a laptop, you could look at what you have in terms of secondary drive bays and cabling within the machine. If you only have one drive at present, you could install a secondary and/or third/fourth drive, and use these as backup stores for your data.

How much are you willing or able to spend on this exercise....?

Thanks I will try the WinDirStat.

I have 3 external hard drives. 1 is 1tb, the others I think are 550gb and in separate enclosures so prefer not spend nowt if I can!

Arg

There are programs out there that will help you find duplicate files but unfortunately I can't remember any at the moment.