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Question

RE: external hard drive

Jul 22, 2014 5:32AM PDT

Once I have moved things to my external hard drive (say, photoshop or itunes), do I delete these from my computer?
In other words, it is not clear to me how an external hard drive frees up space.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Before you do that, where are the backup copies?
Jul 22, 2014 5:35AM PDT

From your post I see you have 2 copies. The one on the internal and another on the external. So if either go missing you don't lose a thing.

Before you delete the internal HDD copy, you don't want to learn about external drives and reliability the hard way.
Bob

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Yes, two copies.
Jul 22, 2014 7:46PM PDT

Thank you, Bob. Yes, I have essentially two copies. One external. one internal. This leads me to 2 further questions. Do I then delete the internal copy of a given item (say, "downloads"), to free up space? If so, then I would need to plug in my external hard drive to access and work with "downloads", correct?

By the way, I also subscribe to a cloud service that backs up everything. Tommy.

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Re: copies
Jul 22, 2014 8:05PM PDT

If I understand you correcty, you have 3 copies of certain files (say, the files in your downloads-folder): internal, external, cloud. If you delete one (say: internal) you have 2 left (external and cloud), and more space on your internal disk.
I wouldn't do that for files you need regularly, because both external and cloud are slower than internal.

Kees

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hard drive
Jul 22, 2014 10:23PM PDT

Thank you, Kees. Most helpful.

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Answer
re your external hard drive and dup files on CPU hard drive
Aug 7, 2014 12:11PM PDT

I have an external hard drive & love it. I recently just had my CPU cleaned out, Before I gave my CPU to the tech guy, I zipped up all my important documents, pictures & videos, etc. on my CPU's HD & then moved them to my external hard drive, thus deleting them from my CPU HD. This way everything is on my external HD & nothing is on my CPU's HD freeing up space & preventing anything to get lost, removed, etc. while the tech guy has it & is working on it. I lost a bunch of documents yrs ago from a tech guy & made sure it would never happen again. By doing this, nothing is lost.

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Re: external
Aug 7, 2014 6:10PM PDT

External drives are rather unreliable. So if your only copy is on one of those, and you have no backup on another medium, there's a good risk of losing it. Be sure to have 2 copies of it at least.

Kees

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Close, but can be trouble.
Aug 8, 2014 2:42AM PDT

If you reduce your copies to 1 and 1 device you run the risk of losing it all and learning the second half of the lesson. I see Kees noted why this is half a solution.
Bob

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Ex. drive
Aug 8, 2014 4:33AM PDT

Thank you. Most helpful.

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ex. drive
Aug 8, 2014 4:32AM PDT

Thank you, Erin. Great answer.