External hard drives

[gedk]

I have added an external hard drive to my pc. , Can i free up space on my internal hard drive by transferring files to the external, ie music held on windows media player, my pictures etc, or would i just be duplicating the same info that would use up space on both drives. or can i only save new files ,music etc to the external drive.

i am using windows xp.

i have probably not explained myself very well, if not, feel free to ridicule me.

thanks

 ged

[wideboy]

Yes, you can free up a lot of space now - back up to your external hard drive but look after it! Would be useful to back up to CD or DVD if you can (but it might take a lot of them). Best of luck! (Don't forget to delete the files from your internal hard drive once you're happy with your backups).

[TEAK36]

You can most definately transfer your files.I have an external Hard drive and did exactly this.I simply used Windows Explorer to drag and drop into the External hard drive, and this meant I did not have to delete the originals from my internal drive.

[fo3nix]

You can basically do whatever you want with an external drive that you can do with an internal one.

If your external drive has a large capacity, much larger than your internal drive, then you could partition it (with something like PartitionMagic):

- one partition for backups
- one partition for extra storage

Use the first to backup your entire internal hard drive with something like Norton Ghost (your external drive may have come with its own software for this purpose).

The use the second partition to store anything you like; pictures, music, anything!

[Space]

if you "drag and drop" files from a drive to the other, the system will duplicate them.
To avoid that, there are 2 ways:
Drag and drop while holding down a shift key
or
"cut" your files and "paste" them on the destination.
cut and paste are available when you click on a folder or a file with the right mouse button