Quick Easy Tech Tips, Tricks and Reviews, with a little bit of Dog Stuff!
Have you ever had a large USB drive that only shows 200mb when you plug it into your Windows computer? Frustrating isn’t it!
And what makes it worse is that nothing you try in the “Format” utility will change it – it always says 200mb in the capacity drop down.
The reason this happens is that in some stage in the USB Drive’s life it has been plugged into a Mac, and it has done “Mac Things” to the drive. Thankfully, there is an easy way to fix it.
Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
I managed to find free Treemap programs for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. For Windows users, you need to get a copy of WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) HERE. Once installed, you can start it up and tell it to either analyze your whole drive, or specific folders. Here’s how it looks.
There is two options for Mac users. Grand Perspective (Gets up and going really quickly, easy to use) and Disk Inventory X (Longer to scan but a more thorough and detailed interface). Here’s how Grand Perspective looks.
And this is how Disk Inventory X Looks.
For Linux users, you can get KDirStat HERE. I havent tried it yet, but it looks very similar to WinDirStat. This screen capture is from their site.
They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
My iPhone/iTunes has been bugging me for a while now about how my phone is running out of memory, and it won’t let me load more music, or take new photographs or video. My first instinct was that I should clean house, and move some photos or songs off it, and whilst it was plugged in to my Mac I noticed something interesting in the storage capacity stats window:
1.03 GB of Other? I would much rather have an extra GB of music and photos than a GB of “Other”! So, I did a little bit of research and it looks to me that “other” is stuff like contacts, calendars and emails etc, so no joy to be had there, but it is also log files, history, cache, and other gunk that is meaningless to most users. There were also reports in the Apple forums that you can reclaim “some” of that space with a full system restore. So I thought I would give it a try!
I started by making a full backup of my phone. Once my iPhone was plugged in to my computer, and it showed up in iTunes, I right clicked on it and selected “Backup” from the menu. It took a few minutes to copy everything over.
Once that was all done, I went to the “Summary” window and clicked the “Restore” button.
After clicking the usual procession of Ok’s, Yes Please’s, and I Understand’s, it set about completely wiping my iPhone.
Once it had erased the memory, it began uploading the 4.3.5 software installation, powered on and off a few times, and then I got asked if I wanted to restore my phone from the back up I created, or if I wanted to start my phone from fresh again. I clicked “Restore from Back Up” so it would reinstall my apps, contacts, music etc etc and off it went again It did take some time to completely erase, and re-install the software and my files and info (about 15-20 minutes), but it was well worth it!
My iPhone went from 1.03GB of “Other” down to 0.24GB of “Other”! That’s nearly 800KB of “Other” that can now be used for photos and music!
