What's going on here?

[ayjay]

C & D drive are partitions of my main hard drive.

F is the hard drive from my previous PC

G is an external drive which has all my photos and a few other bits backed up to it, (that's done automatically every day).

If I click on *Properties* for each folder on G drive and add the totals they come to less than 30 GB, but as you can see from the screen-shot it says there's only 85 GB free out of 931 GB on the whole drive.

G drive crop.jpg (107.82 KiB) Viewed 4125 times

[Someone-Else]

Although its windows, I have yet to see it lie.
Have you asked your computer to show "hidden files" is usually a little box you need to tick.

I have an option to "disc clean" have you tried that (under general tab for your HD)

[wine~o]

30 GB saved every day for 30 days will be 900 GB, windows doesn't remove previous back-ups until space is needed on the relevant drive unless you do it manually (SFAIA I could be wrong)

[ayjay]

I can't find "Show Hidden Files", but I don't think there are any, or at least not many.

The main folder I use on G has 22.7GB, that's exactly the same size as it is on D. - and this PC has been in use for approximately 950 days, so on that basis it would have been more than full many months ago.

It's not Windows that's doing the back-ups. I use a Replicator programme, (Karens Replicator) I've used the same programme for a good few years now - it's antiquated, designed for Win 3.1 but it still works OK, there's a whole plethora of instructions that you have to give it to get things right, but it uses C & D drive as the master and each folder on G is an exact replica.

[Dave54]

I wonder if it's anything to do with that antiquated program, and your drives using NTFS rather than FAT.
Backup programs are funny things. They tend to dig deeper than you would think.

I've been using Acronis now for several years. It's cheap enough to buy and keep updated TBH.
I don't want to risk my images not being backed up properly.

[wine~o]

I wonder if it's anything to do with that antiquated program, and your drives using NTFS rather than FAT.
Backup programs are funny things. They tend to dig deeper than you would think.

I've been using <span class="skimwords-potential">Acronis</span><span style="position: absolute;"></span><span style="position: absolute;"></span> now for several years. It's cheap enough to buy and keep updated TBH.
I don't want to risk my images not being backed up properly.

I had major issues with retrieving my files from Acronis.(long story)

@ Ayjay. do you really need to do daily backups ? With an external drive you can do a manual backup whenever. Right click the file(s) that you want right click then "copy to" and select in your case drive G

[Someone-Else]

I do as wine~O says, manual back up, I found the software for my external HD wasn't as good as it made out, and of course, only found out when I needed it.

As I use firefox, I have signed up to sync (free) really good, this pc did go wrong, formatted it, with sync everything (browser related) back within minutes, like wise with thunderbird for email, EVERYTHING came back.

Oh, uncle carry swears by acronis. Seen him copy a hard drive with it.

[Dave54]

I had major issues with retrieving my files from Acronis.(long story)

@ Ayjay. do you really need to do daily backups ? With an external drive you can do a manual backup whenever. Right click the file(s) that you want right click then "copy to" and select in your case drive G

I've had problems with every backup software I've tried. Acronis seems the most reliable so far. At least when the system wouldn't run, and I did a full restore, it wouldn't, but at least my files were still there and available!

I use an SSD for the C drive with just the OS and programs on it. Stored images and so on go on a bigger, conventional HDD.

TBH wine~o, I'm not so sure about that backup system of just copying files working. I've tried that several times over the years. It seems to work for a while, but then it fails on rewriting files which have been altered.

The whole backup thing is a complete PITA.

[ayjay]

I wonder if it's anything to do with that antiquated program, and your drives using NTFS rather than FAT.
Backup programs are funny things. They tend to dig deeper than you would think.

I don't think it does any digging, it just compares the relevant folders on each drive and if there's any changes on C & D it makes the same changes on G.

The way I use my picture folders really wouldn't lend itself to copy & paste - I download all new pictures to one folder - that sorts them by date - then after a few days I'll sort them into a relevant folder - and that could be one of hundreds - later, I'll get around to working on the pics, cropping, resizing, a bit of filtering and colour enhancement. I need any or all of those processes to be replicated on the external HD at least on a daily basis, otherwise I could have 200 -300 pics sat in the *New Downloads" folder for a few days at risk of being lost, and then to copy and paste them manually would be a nightmare remembering where they all are.

I don't think it's a problem with the antiquated programme, I've used it without a problem for a long time on previous PCs and since I started using this one (Jan 2017 iirc), G drive has only been showing red like that since yesterday.

[ayjay]

I'm partway to solving this after a long chat with Nipper this evening.

On his suggestion I downloaded a programme called *WinDirSat* which shows me everything on that drive.

Something, probably Windows Backup , (but we've not established that exactly yet) is backing up to a folder on the drive and it contains over 500GB of back-ups which are all hidden - the folder shows as empty if I just look under *Properties*.

We left it there for now, as my head was spinning, and he needs his beauty sleep.

[Bob225]

go into windows explorer - This PC - double click on your G drive then click on view and tick the Hidden files box on the righthand side, also tick show file extensions

The hidden backup files what file format are they in ? eg. .BAK, ,001

it may have been an initial recovery backup, daily back up is a bit ott

[ayjay]

go into windows explorer - This PC - double click on your G drive then click on view and tick the Hidden files box on the righthand side, also tick show file extensions

The hidden backup files what file format are they in ? eg. .BAK, ,001

it may have been an initial recovery backup, daily back up is a bit ott

My PC doesn't seem to have the same options in the same places as you suggest, possibly as I'm using Win 7 not Win 10. I think I did see a Bak extension on most of the back-up files.

I had tried more or less what you said a few days earlier, when I clicked on the *Hidden* box, the one large folder on that drive disappeared, it took a while, but once it was finished it was nowhere to be seen.

I have however more or less sorted this out now:- I found from just digging around that Windows prefers to make back-ups to external drives (it actually says that in the info I was reading).

I've never set it to do a back-up, it has done that all by itself weekly, and then saved those in blocks of three months to my G drive. I've deleted all but the last block and cancelled the automatic back-ups.

I've now got 583 GB free space on G, it should still be more but I'll have a further dig around when I next have a chat with Nipper.

(With considerable relief). I'll continue to run my old Replicator programme daily as that is not the cause of the problem, it's not the same as a back-up, it just compares my photo folders on D drive to copies of those folders on G drive and then makes those on G the same as D, it also deletes anything on G that is now not in those folders on D.