Problem downloading from Google Drive to an external drive

[Davedrave]

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.

[Spelk]

Hi Dave, did you manage to get the data downloaded?

[Davedrave]

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🙂

[Spelk]

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.

[Davedrave]

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

[Biggles50]

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.

[Spelk]

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.

[Davedrave]

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

[Davedrave]

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