Good morning. I have an old My Passport Essential 1T portable hard drive. I’ve used it to back my last 3 computers. I’m currently using it with my 4th computer, but now it’s out of space. Using Windows Explorer, I attempted to delete the old computer backups from my last 3 computers under the ‘WD SmartWare.swstor’ folder. I was able to remove 1 computer backup entirely, and the documents/pictures/music from the other 2, but I cannot get rid of the program files from the last 2 computer backups. The drive keeps asking for admin permission to remove certain files; I grant it and it just ignores the command and asks again about the same file(s).
A screenshot is enclosed. Other than wiping the HD and starting over, does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you.
Sorry to read another space problem, but the permission issue is bigger.
seems like you’ve given permissions to various folders in the swstor folder.
do you see multiple volume folders…since you did multiple PC’s, I’m guessing there will be different PC names and probably folders that have different permissions.
I’ve been using the Free Treesize program to view the folder tree of the external drive. The beauty of programs like this…allows getting a tree of all you files. After running, you can expand the tree to drill down into folders that have high size or high number of files…In a previous post of mine, I found a Mozilla cache folder with over 4million files.
once you determine where your large files are located (probably in movies) you can carefully use Explorer to delete…be careful, there is a volume (current files) and history folder (up to 5 copies). Rt mouse a folder can open Treesize for that folder. You can also just use the Explorer/Properties for basic folder sizes.
are the other PC’s still a valuable set of files for those other PC’s or have you replaced/no longer have devices. Do you want to keep these old files.
sounds like 1T is going to be a future problem if you backup lots of movies, you may need to expand
Thank you. Yes, each computer has its own folder named for that computer. Once I click on the folder, the volume shows up. Further clicking continues down the tree until I hit files. No, I don’t want the other computer backups, only my current computer and its backups. I’ll take a closer look at the properties.
Techlover…good luck…Come back and post what discoveries you found in the Folder Properties so we all might learn something.
that permission item can be unfortunate. Each newer PC’s admin, user…etc could identify each folder differently. Then when you look at the Folders on the 1TB, and want to delete there becomes conflicts…good luck
I’ve had good success with the Free version of Treesize…allows me to browse folder Trees and drill down to find those with high sizes and files. Quite eye opening to see where stuff is stored. You can sort on either…cannot find a good print, so I use Windows Snip to screen capture. Better than folder Properties since you get the tree to expand.
You can try formatting the drive to delete old backups from the drive or else you can try using 3rd party data eraser tool which helps the user to delete or wipe the old or waste data from any storage drive and make your drive ready to re-use again. There are many data eraser tool which are easily available however, here I will recommend to try BitRaser File Eraser, it will help you wipe data from any storage drive.
Thanks again for the tip about Treesize! It’s pretty cool. I just downloaded it and can see that the older data that I was trying to get rid of was deleted a few days ago. I just can’t get rid of those folders. As you can see from the screenshot, I’m still getting the permissions message. I’ll probably just delete the Samsung backup folder that I created for a little more space. In the end, I’ll probably just wipe it and restart.
Techlover…great to see that you are starting to get a handle on that size issue of your Passport.
looks like you got your used space down to 221gb from an almost full drive. Or maybe this is just the Tree from one of your multiple folders so that you are still looking for more room.
I’m not sure if running Treesize as Admin does anything to the actual processing or data display of the Tree. I’ve normally used Continue, but just now tried Admin…looks the same. Also, at the bottom of Treesize there is a running dialog while processing…just let it run
you can also hi-lite a Explorer folder and rt mouse to select Treesize.
you can select the top of the columns to re-sort the values…
as to permissions on the USER-HP folder, I’m guessing you tried everything to change ownership. That originally was from 2012
you also said earlier that each computer has it’s own folder…is the DESKTOP…the only one that you cannot delete from?
Hello. Sorry for the delayed response. After some more digging, I located additional files to delete. I still couldn’t remove the 2 older computers. It looks like I initially backup up everything, including Windows programs. That’s where the “permissions” prompts came in. I ended up wiping the entire drive and starting over. It’s backing up now. Thank you so much for your help!
Congratz Techlover…glad you got your arms around your issues. Having a !Tb drive that runs out of space can be bothersome…unfortunately with this Backup programs, one tends to do Windows Programs and other apps stuff instead of what you really cannot do without. As I said previously, I did some Mozilla folders under AppData that cost me over 4million cache2 files. Since each temp working file had a timestamp name, months of junk was there. I was running a malware checker that kept getting stuck on some files. Used Treesize and found the bad folders…gathered by thoughts, then deleted a ton of files, even if they didn’t occupy much space.
So you formatted the drive, or did you just Admin delete all the folders? Be careful of the folders/files you now backup and keep checking the space. You’ve got Treesize in case you need it too. My backup schedule seems to be holding up, have not read where users are having big issues…I had some that I posted about backup not starting on schedule.
