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General => Technical Help => Topic started by: Davedrave on Wednesday 10 June 26 19:11 BST (UK)
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I have my family history files in a couple of large folders (maybe 6GB) in the ether on Google Drive (as well as on iPad) and want to save them to an SSD external drive. This is a 1TB drive, and still has over 130GB free. However, if I copy one of the files from Google Drive (showing as drive G on my Windows 10 laptop) and then try to paste into drive E (the SSD), I’m getting the message that there isn’t enough free space in the folder. Any suggestions please.
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What file system is the SSD formatted with?
If you go into Disk Manager and look at the SSD is there a hidden partition?
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Is it maybe not the space on the GDrive or the SSD but the space you have free on your laptop through which the data will have to flow. Ideally you would have more than 6G of RAM spare on the laptop so it did not have to bother using hard drive space as pseudo RAM.
Try moving the stuff you want to move in smaller chunks.
And why are you doing it as copy and paste. I'd have thought you could just drag the folder from one drive to another which, as they are separated drives, should create a new copy rather than removing it from the source drive.
PS if you have the same data on an iPad why not take it from there so as not to use internet download which will be slower than moving the data locally.
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If you're seeing your Google Drive as drive G: in Windows Explorer, it sounds like you're using the Drive app for Windows. This essentially translates between Google's and Microsoft's two very different ways of doing things behind the scenes.
Try going to https://drive.google.com in your web browser instead. Login if you need to, find the files or folders you're interested in, right-click and choose Download. I use Drive at work and this is often a more reliable method of copying/moving things.
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Thanks for your suggestions. I think that one major problem I have is that the “C” drive of my laptop has zero free space. I have no idea what is occupying all that space (103 GB, it seems), because I have all my saved photos and files on the “D” drive, and the “C” drive is just used by the OS, and I don’t even have a large number of programs, mainly photo editing and word processing.
Is there some sort of cable to allow direct connection between an 8th generation iPad and my (Samsung) SSD (which has so far been connected only to my Windows 10 laptop ???
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Windows creates a lot of files and does not necessarily does it remove them once it is finished using them.
Open Explorer select C drive, right click and select Clean Up.
Once it id’s them select all then delete.
There are a mass of other actions that you can do as well are the easiest way it to type “Windows 10 C drive cleanup” into Google then watch a couple of the tutorial videos and follow along with them.
With your laptop is the internal hard drive partitioned into two or more drives or is it just the one drive?
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If your external SSD drive is empty of files, folders and data (If you have date on your external SSD - check what DATA is on the SSD drive as it will be lost forever once formatted) or if its new - then you could try formatting it. - read link how to do it
As said: Take your time, deeply digest how to format before making any attempts to do it
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+format+a+SSD+drive+for+windows+10&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB1115GB1115&sca_esv=f0072408fc3f5466&biw=1229&bih=485&sxsrf=ANbL-n5ZuJ0j8pl_bbSwT1rQT_IEZ7RPUQ%3A1781185221835&ei=xboqauDFMouBhbIP0cKiqQI&ved=0ahUKEwigvLSDqP-UAxWLQEEAHVGhKCUQ4dUDCBI&oq=how+to+format+a+SSD+drive+for+windows+10&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiKGhvdyB0byBmb3JtYXQgYSBTU0QgZHJpdmUgZm9yIHdpbmRvd3MgMTAyCBAhGKABGMMESLqfAVCWD1iORnACeAGQAQCYAZIBoAHzBqoBAzYuM7gBDMgBAPgBAZgCC6AC4wfCAgoQABhHGNYEGLADwgIHECMYsAIYJ8ICBRAAGO8FwgIIEAAYiQUYogTCAgYQABgHGB7CAgsQABiABBiKBRiGA8ICCBAAGIAEGKIEwgIGEAAYHhgNwgIIEAAYCBgeGA3CAgQQABgewgIKECEYChigARjDBJgDAIgGAZAGCJIHAzcuNKAHzDiyBwM1LjS4B80HwgcFMi01LjbIB1SACAE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
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As from your first post you have load of stuff saved onto your external SSD drive then you will not want to format it.
Re connecting your SSD direct to the iPad. My iPad is version 5 so might not be as good as yours but in my experience when you connect any device like even a USB memory stick let alone a SSD drive to an iPhone or iPad they refuse to play with them on the basis that they require too much power.
So I bought a connection box which I plug into my MacBook which provides the power. A plain USB power source may do.
The connection box has a selection of sockets such as USBc and USBa types, SD slot, HDMI, and Ethernet and one thin slot labelled TF which I cannot recall what it does. So all sorts off things can be plugged in and it should suit your SSD drive and the iPad with the use of suitable cables. The connection box cost about £20 and is needed for many uses on my MacBook which of course only has two Thunderbird (USBc) connections.
However even you wanted to try the above your C Drive certainly needs sorting out as it seems to be chocker and your PC must be struggling. So follow Biggle's instructions. Unless you have loads (like 16 Gb or more) of RAM your PC will be using your hard drive as pseudo RAM which is a slow way to do anything.
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I would be tempted to leave the 1Tb SSD for now and buy a 2Tb one.
I buy a Sabrent or Ugreen SSD enclosure off Amazon and a 2Tb SSD M2 stick. Open the packaging for both and extract the SSD, open up the Sabent enclosure and slot in the SSD. Secure the SSD and add the stick on heat sink to the SSD, close it up and secure it.
Connect the lead and plug it into a PC, in the search box type Disk Manager and when it opens you will see the SSD, enable the partition and format it exFAT.
It is then ready to go and yes it is that quick and easy to do.
Then you can backup/copy all the files.
As prior an iPad or Mobile is not likely to have sufficient power to supply an SSD. For info, I have an iPad Pro and it does power an SSD.
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Many thanks for your help and suggestions. I’ll study them carefully, and proceed with extreme caution, and certainly only keep my existing SSD for filling up with further photo files downloaded from my laptop. The thought of maybe wrecking thousand of photo raw files I taken over the years makes me feel faint, so an entirely separate SSD for any downloads from my iPad seems very sensible.
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Hi Dave, did you manage to get the data downloaded?
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Hi Dave, did you manage to get the data downloaded?
Hi, no, haven’t sorted it yet, but what I’m currently thinking of doing is getting in touch with a local computer repair shop (which seems to get good reviews) to see about getting a considerably larger “C” drive fitted to my laptop, because I have pretty much zero space left on it now.The laptop is still in very good condition, and I really don’t want a new one running Windows 11, because some of my photo editing software wouldn’t work with that, and I don’t want to start having to invest in new versions of some programs which cost me quite a lot of money not that many years ago, and which I find perfectly adequate for my purposes.
In the meantime, I have all of my FH files backed up on Google Drive, so at least I wouldn’t lose them if anything went amiss with my iPad.
Dave🙂
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A point of clarification. You seem to have the hard drive of the computer split between a C drive and a D drive and you use the D drive for your data. Correct?
You said in an earlier post that the C drive is used only for the Operating system and it is full at 103 Gbytes.
You also will have Application programs which you have purchased. These are not part of the Operating system but I,d guess that you have loaded them onto the C drive. Correct?
Some Application programs keep the data they are fed with and they generate within their own folder by default. Thus your C drive may actually contain quite a lot of data as well as the programs. Probably not an issue but if you do lots of photo editing then there maybe loads of temporary images filed away on your C drive which you do not need.
As Biggles said earlier you should give your computer a spring clean. You could find that you have lots of space when you have got rid of years of dross.
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A point of clarification. You seem to have the hard drive of the computer split between a C drive and a D drive and you use the D drive for your data. Correct?
You said in an earlier post that the C drive is used only for the Operating system and it is full at 103 Gbytes.
You also will have Application programs which you have purchased. These are not part of the Operating system but I,d guess that you have loaded them onto the C drive. Correct?
Some Application programs keep the data they are fed with and they generate within their own folder by default. Thus your C drive may actually contain quite a lot of data as well as the programs. Probably not an issue but if you do lots of photo editing then there maybe loads of temporary images filed away on your C drive which you do not need.
As Biggles said earlier you should give your computer a spring clean. You could find that you have lots of space when you have got rid of years of dross.
Thanks for this. Yes, as far as I know, I keep all of my files (photos, FH records etc) on the conventional hard drive (‘D’) and only use the SSD for the OS and programs I’ve added myself. I’ve run the disc cleanup program numerous times, but only seem to have been able to free up a negligible few Mb. When I’ve looked at the apps, the only sizeable ones I have are a couple of hefty photo editors, but I don’t think even the larger exceeds 1Gb. I also empty the recycle bin. When I tried to find what was actually occupying the drive, there were tens of Gb which weren’t detailed, but it said something along the lines of “these are necessary to the functioning of the system”. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about computers to be able to dig deeper here, which is why I wonder whhether a reputable computer repair shop would help here.
Dave :)
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As your single computer drive seems to be partitioned into C and D then the easy workaround is to use a Partition Resizing App to extend the C partition.
Copy all your data on the D drive to a portable hard drive then run the resizing app, it should move the data on D in the process but its best to have a copy of the data just in case.
There are command prompt tasks that can clear up data on a C drive but I’m loath to put them here, if you wish to try then there are plenty of tutorials that show what to do.
The Windows key + R opens a Command Prompt Window.
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Biggles, I was also thinking that Dave had a hard drive partitioned into C and D. I had the myself once,
But from what he says I think he has two distinct drives in his computer. He has a SSD drive which is probably 128 GB in size, and also they have fitted a conventional spinning disc drive which were much cheaper. Even Apple were selling iMacs configured like that at one time.
That size SSD should be adequate for any Operating System, its operating data files and Applications if large data files such as photos and videos are stored elsewhere.
My Apple laptop is only using about 97 Gb of its 250 GB SSD. The OS is about 25 GB and has about 10 GB of System Files (not to be touched) and less than 10 GB of applications. Photos and videos are on my iCloud as well as most data so I can access from iMac, iPad, iPhone and share with others.
A larger SSD would probably solve Dave's current problem but whether it is really required I can't say. I gave up DOS based OS when ten years ago Microsoft downloaded 10 GB of Windows 10 onto my PC without my permission or even telling me.
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Thanks.
This is copied from a screenshot of the laptop properties display. (I think the laptop is a Dell XPS 15):
Device Name DESKTOP-SETE2AK
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8300H CPU @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB (7.74 GB usable)
Storage 932 GB HDD TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100, 119 GB SSD SK hynix SC311 SATA 128GB
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (4 GB), Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (128 MB)
Product ID 00325-96494-04794-AAOEM
System Type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
I'll try and post a copy of the info that comes up when go into disk cleanup.
Dave :)
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Looking into “Storage”, OS(C) is 103 GB used, 558 MB free.
Apps and features: 60.3 GB
Temporary files: 5.04 GB
(Local Disk (D) is 616 GB used, 315 GB free.)
What makes up the difference between 65.34 GB and 103 GB ???
Dave :)
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Dave, when you run the disk cleanup are you using it on the D drive or the C drive?
You say you have emptied the trash can. You may well have separate trash cans for the C drive and the D drive.
I think Temporary files can be safely deleted but best get a second opinion on that.
60 GB for Applications is way over the top - must be storing loads of data in their folders.
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Thanks. I’m definitely performing Disk Cleanup on the “C” drive. I’ve also removed all but the most recent restore points, which has made no difference at all to the free space. I’m still looking into the recycle bin question.
Dave :)