External hard drive conundrum

[Speed Stick]

I'm not computer savvy, but I was under the impression that an external hard drive was supposed to free up space on your primary hard drive when you backed your files up. I've already backed up every single file/folder on my hard drive. Yet, it still shows up almost filled to capacity. I'm guessing I needs to do a little something else.

A little help, por favor

 

[Harvey]

The idea is that you can delete seldom used files from your main drive and have them available on the external drive when you need them. If you didn't delete the files from your main drive, you didn't reduce the amount of stored data.

If you need to have most of your files available at all times, you need a larger hard drive.

 

[Speed Stick]

AY!!

Muchas gracias.

 

[dderolph]

Also, if you use backup software, it is probably backing up your files in a special backup file format on the external drive. So, you can't just work directly with such files. The idea is to have the backup there in case the files on your main hard drive get inadvertently deleted or corrupted, or your main hard drive fails, you can restore your files from the backup files. In this scenario, you wouldn't want to delete the files from your main hard drive unless you really no longer want them.

If you merely copy files from your main hard drive to an external drive, rather than use backup software, then you could work directly with them, or you could put new files on the external drive from the moment they are created and always work with them there.

 

[NoelS]

Originally posted by: Speed Stick
I'm not computer savvy, but I was under the impression that an external hard drive was supposed to free up space on your primary hard drive when you backed your files up. I've already backed up every single file/folder on my hard drive. Yet, it still shows up almost filled to capacity. I'm guessing I needs to do a little something else.

A little help, por favor

EDIT: Apologies to dderolph - I wrote this post because your post didn't show up on my computer for some reason. Otherwise, I would have passed on it - Noel

Speed Stick,

I use external backups as protection in case I lose a HDD. In that case, I have EVERYTHING on the external HDD and can put it back onto a new drive.

Also as Harvey says, you can recover all those seldom used files when you seem to have "lost" them (or have lost them) or have deleted them to save room and need to get them back.

I use an external HDD larger than my primary drives so I can put whatever extra on it that I want to save, for whatever reason, including moving files to it to free up space on the primary drives (in addition to my backups).

Also, I use an eSATA enclosure to get speedy recoveries - about 3-4 times faster than USB. You can plug it into a back plane eSATA connector or install an eSATA bracket (like from a PCI slot that's not used) with a connection to your motherboard...

Noel