If your hard drive is filling too quickly

[The_Traveler]

I was worrying that my main hard drive was filling and was up to 78% so I looked for a utility that would map the drive down to the file level and pinpoint what was happening.

I found WinDirStat, a free utility that tells me everyhting I want to know about the file bulge.

It's available from anumber of open source depositories and the sole issue is that it doesn't run super fast.

So now I spend a bit of time going through and removing crap files, shrinking PSDs and resaving too-fat TIFF files as PSDs.

 

[korn_2956]

Just get a bigger drive.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

 

[The_Traveler]

yes, of course I could do that but then I'd have to copy my entire existing drive to the new one and that means a lot of effort I don't want to do.

 

[evancamp13]

I know this is an old thread, but copying a hard drive only takes about 15 minutes of set up, then you just let it run until the clone process is complete. All in all, about 3-4 hours of time, but you only have to do something for about 15-20 minutes of that time... it's pretty simple actually and very very worth it to update to a SSD

 

[Desert Rose]

WinDirStat is old software (13 years old) but it still works on older versions of Windows. For Win 10 a solution is built right in. Just go to settings>system>storage and click the drive you want to see. You can even do uninstalls from there of software you don't use.

Dupe Guru photo is a great addition that will find all duplicate photo files and let you manage them very easily. It's also old but works still.

BTW, your main drive is NOT the one you showed here, it is the 'C' drive where Windows Is installed, the drive you showed is an additional storage drive (I).

A good NAS is always a nice addition to your set up. I installed a 32TB NAS with PLEX for streaming video that also works well as photo storage and with RAID 5 (striping and distributed parity) it can lose a drive and not lose data and it writes and reads 3 times faster that a single drive but still gives you 3/4 of the total drive space to store files so mine actually only gives me an additional 24TB of space, but that is enough for now. It's still a good practice to back up to an off site location as well.

 

[nerwin]

Are people still using 80gig hard drives or something?

 

[zombiesniper]

Are people still using 80gig hard drives or something?

I imagine some are. I just drill holes in the bottom of the top drive and holes in the top of the bottom drive. That way the data can flow down and fill both drives.

 

[Maui Photographer]

You can buy a 4 tb drive these days for thunderbolt or Esat that can do it in minutes $200-$400. It comes down to how much you think your time is worth. It is good to get new ones too, as the old ones slowly become incompatible to the point of having to do tons of work arounds, which is even more time consuming. Wish you the best. Drive stuff is always mundane and not much fun. Rather be shooting