Out of hard disk space!

[WhiteEagle22]

Hey all,

I've ran out of hard drive space on my computer, and cannot afford to buy an external hard drive to move my music files (which are 45 GB total). Is there any other way of freeing up space so I can remove programs to free up more space?

TIA,
Nathan P.

 

[Mise]

Delete stuff?

 

[Bratmon]

Compress the drive?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Mise is right. And unless you delete a lot of stuff, removing the small space using programs and files is at best going to give you a few GB.

Save up and get another HDD. You can find 750GB ones for around 55$ on sale nowadays.

 

[Mise]

Compress the drive?

He seems to suggest that mp3s take up the bulk of his HDD space, so compressing it probably wouldn't do much. These days most programs (games and such) already store the bulkier bits of data in compressed files, because processors are fast enough to uncompress them and load them during the load screens. Additionally, compressing a drive limits you to lossless compression methods, which tends to only be useful on text files (which probably don't take up much space anyway).

 

[mdwh]

Burn to CD/DVDs?

Also, Sequoiaview is a great tool to quickly see what's taking up all your space, and seeing if there might be big files lying around that you don't actually want: http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Look for dup files?
http://www.clonespy.com/ (this is a neat tool, it compares checksums)

 

[Turner]

Probably you have too much space reserved for your temporary internet files and system restore. Knock your System Restore down to about 2%, and your temporary internet files down to about 100mb. That should free up some space.

Also, if you have hibernation set on your computer but don't actually use it, that'll free up however much RAM you have. So if you have two gigs of RAM, it'll free up two gigs of RAM but shutting it off.

 

[kulade]

Delete some of your old porn.

Ultimately, there is little you can do until you can afford a new hard drive; you can shave yourself off a few more megs here and there by compressing files or deleting your system restore and such, but I'm expecting your amount of music is ever-increasing.

 

[Shadylookin]

45 gigs of music is roughly 30 days worth of non-stop music Surely you can afford to part with some of it. You could try running disk cleanup if you haven't done it in a while you can get a lot out of it. Delete personal files and programs you're not going to use.

 

[Zelig]

45 gigs of music is roughly 30 days worth of non-stop music Surely you can afford to part with some of it.

I"ve got about four times that in music length, much more in file size... I can afford to keep it though, 1GB is worth <$0.10.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I have a piddly 10gigs of music. Quite a few DVDs, though. I collect Petty videos. Sometimes they come in compiliations so I use DVD Shrink to extract the parts I need.

 

[Shadylookin]

I"ve got about four times that in music length, much more in file size... I can afford to keep it though, 1GB is worth <$0.10.

I'm packing 1.5tb. Those of us with harddrive space out the wazzo don't need to care about the trivial things we store, but the lessers among us have to choose wisely what they want to keep. I'm guessing that there's at least a days worth of music he probably doesn't even listen to.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Indeed. I've got 4 TB now ( yay cheap HDD's) and I have no idea what a 4th of the stuff I have is. I just have it from a while ago...

 

[IamJohn]

Another solution is to get online storage, Mozy gives you a free gig of space, and there's another that gives out something like 4gb if you do some easy promotion (give them 4 email addresses? I just gave them email address from mailinator.com if I remember right)

 

[lndm]

Empty the recycle bin, then right click it and change it's size.