My old laptop died unexpectedly in 2024. I had a large hard drive, but it was nowhere near as large as the drive I got on the replacement laptop. With all this extra space, I did not expect to run into issues with storage.
Silly me.
It began with my backup service. It restored files that were already on my computer, stopped running because the drive was full, and then (after I fixed some of the duplication) despite claiming it would resume where it left off, it wanted to start all over again! I downloaded the files I wanted to make sure I had, and a couple months later, when my subscription expired, I let it lapse. This headache was not worth the money.
Some of my storage problems might still be related to this because I haven't gone through and deleted every duplicated file yet. It's on the To-Do list, but there are a lot of other things on that list ahead of it.
But my 1 TB hard drive was nearly full and balking.
Last week, I finally had enough. Pictures, videos, graphics, music--they were all coming off the hard drive and going onto an external drive. I just needed to buy one. After weighing size versus cost, I chose a 5 TB option.
I moved photos first. Apparently, not the problem.
Music went next. Nope.
Then I did my graphics folder. There was the issue.
I'm not sure how it didn't choke my old laptop. I bought that one in 2016 and I know I didn't have 1TB of space on my hard drive, yet somehow, I had space there. The new laptop? It was screaming I'm full!
I have more stuff I need to move and even more to organize, but at least I can work on my laptop again without worrying about things not saving because of space issues. Sigh. I guess I should have paid for the 2 TB laptop, but since I was already like doubling my storage, it didn't feel necessary.
Next time, I'll know better.