Too Much on Hard Disk

Believe it or not, you can over-fill a hard drive. It is recommended to have about 15% of the space free. Why? Because your PC needs it.

During activity, the computer sometimes stores files temporarily on the hard drive. When it is done with them, the files are removed. If it can't find enough space, however, problems can occur.

It's very easy to check how much free space there is on your hard drive. Double-click My Computer/Computer, and there will be an icon for your hard drive (usually labelled C:). If you right-click on the drive icon, you will get a pie chart of free and used space on the drive. (This is especially useful for those of us who dislike doing percentages in our heads!)

A good service from a reputable computer technician will release some free space. However, the main reason hard drives get over-full is because we store so many files on them.

Many of us have good intentions with our holiday digital photos, for example. "I'll just copy them onto the PC, to store them safely, and in the dark days of winter I'll spend happy hours editing, enhancing, and generally sorting out my collection." Or words to that effect.

Years later, and the photo store has not been touched! Well, that's my confession over.

Whether it's pictures, music, videos, or documents, they first need to be backed up to an external source (memory stick, external hard drive, "the cloud"). Then, regularly review whether you need all those file. If not, remove them.

But above all, keep an eye on how much free space there is on the hard drive. A lot of files stored there means a lot of files to potentially lose if the hard drive fails.

I am writing this beacuse I'm currently working on a laptop that has too many photos on it. Some have been duplicated (I think) in backup folders on the Desktop. I am backing up all the data files I can find, and then I will have to delete some folders so that the laptop can run reasonably smoothly.

It's all rather slow, but I'll get there, and hopefully (fingers crossed) no precious files will be lost. Here's hoping. I now need to concentrate hard. End of blog!