Tech Tip #220: Hard Drive Maintenance and Increasing Your Storage

Very often I hear people refer to their desktop computer as their "hard drive".  In reality, the hard drive is only one component of your computer...and a very important one if you are a "data packrat" like me!  A few years back I chose to relinquish my desktop to a better cause and only use my laptop.  I knew there would be  consequences to this.  Most importantly, the machine did not have the ability for me to swap out parts and upgrade my system over time and therefore I knew that the hard drive would never have the room to store all the multimedia I create.

Let's take a look at your current hard drive capacity.  Go to my computer, right click on your hard drive (c:) and choose PROPERTIES.  It will show you an image of your hard drive and the amount of used, unused and total space.

While we're here, you may wish to click on Disk Cleanup.  This will run a utility which will remove "unrequired" files which have found there way onto your computer over time. This is more important to do if you are approaching disk capacity and find your computer is slowly chugging.




It will take a few minutes and then return a report which you can scroll through.  It will automatically select the ones which are definitely "good to go" and remove them when you press "OK".   I gained 1.3 GB of space on my hard drive after running this utility.

So, in short, I have quite a bit of room on my hard drive, but that is because I do not save ANYTHING on it.  All it holds is the operating system (Windows) and any program files installed (such as Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, photo editing software, etc).  Any files I save are kept on an external hard drive.  This keeps my computer free from bulky files and should my computer crash...I don't have to worry about my important photos of the cat being lost forever!

What is an external hard drive?  A hard drive in a box which you can hook up to your computer via a USB port.  I have three of them.  I use two on a regular basis.  One for work related files (as I do not work on confidential projects I am safe to transport this around with me) and one for personal files (photographs, compositions, documents, etc).  What is the third hard drive for?  I use it to back up the other two hard drives on a weekly basis and store it in a secure and safe area.  The thing you want to remember, is that because an external drive is portable and smaller than an actual computer, it is more likely to be physically damaged if you are not careful.  And of course...these things don't last forever.  So backing up your files is a great idea.  I have a lot of data and use a 1TB hard drive.  I am nowhere near to filling it up.  If you're interested in going this way, you likely don't need that amount of storage capacity; however, if you store a lot of movies and music, you might wish to have that flexibility.

There are also many online storage possibilities should you wish to back up your hard drive such as DropBox.  Or if you are uncomfortable saving your information in the "mysterious cloud", there are other options.  I am currently testing one with a friend, where my files back up nightly in an encrypted folder to his computer and he to mine over the internet through a secure connection.  I will never be able to see his files and he will never be able to see mine because only we hold our own "keys", but we're sharing part of our external hard drives with each other should any disaster occur such as a house fire.