Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 June 15

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 15

External Hard Drive

Resolved

I am completely not a techie.

My problem is: my laptop's hard drive is completely full to overflowing. I have housekept as much as I'm prepared to. I have bought an external hard drive (with far larger capacity than the laptop itself) and have plugged it in to a USB port.

So my question is this. With my very biggest data folders (which in my case are iTunes and Outlook):

1. can I move them to the new external drive? and
2. can I easily "map" (if that's the word) the applications so that they look at the new location, for all purposes, not the old one?

The answer to my first question is an obvious "yes" as regards iTunes, because I can see where all the files are stored. I can't even work that out, as regards Outlook.

Best, AndyJones (talk) 12:33, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

For iTunes use this guide -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 12:37, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant! One problem out of two already solved! AndyJones (talk) 13:02, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

For the Outlook question, is this Microsoft page relevant? It probably depends what version you have, as Outlook has gone through a lot of incarnations over the years, and I imagine they have changed the way things are stored multiple times. 81.98.38.48 (talk) 17:04, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Alternately, if you're using Vista or Win7, instead of figuring out how to inform each application that its files have moved, you can make the old directory (on the laptop drive) point to the new location, using what's called a "directory junction" (or "symbolic link"). The advantage is that the process is the same no matter what you're moving. The disadvantage is a lack of easy-to-use GUI tools for doing this. You could try this one.

Maybe I shouldn't say this, but you are setting yourself up for disaster by not backing up your data. I suppose you could redownload all of your music, but can you reconstruct your Outlook data if it's lost? It must mean something to you if you're not willing to delete it. If I were you I'd keep the Outlook data on the internal hard drive and also periodically back it up to the external drive. -- BenRG (talk) 17:21, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Adding to the above, which was a very good point, another reason to keep the main Outlook data on your internal harddrive is that otherwise you're forcing yourself to have the external harddrive plugged in everytime you want to use Outlook (to receive, send or even just read old emails). Obviously I don't know how/where you use your laptop, but essentially that makes it into a desktop PC unless you're going to carry the external harddrive around everywhere (which will greatly increase the chance of it getting knocked which in turn is a greater chance of it failing and you losing all the data on it). If you're really desperate to move the bulk of your emails though I'd recommend just creating a new Outlook PST storage file on the external drive and only moving older emails into that so at least you could still use your laptop, just you'd have to plug in the external drive and open the PST file to read old emails. This doesn't really solve the backup issue though, but you're at least spreading it out so you'd only lose the emails stored on that harddrive when whichever harddrive fails first.  ZX81  ^talk 04:45, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

You might do better to only move large, "standalone" files to the new hard drive. That is, files that aren't tied to one particular program, such as pictures, audio, or video. All of these can typically be viewed by multiple software products. For proprietary files that only go with one particular software product, it's probably best to keep them together. StuRat (talk) 08:01, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Fantastic advice from everyone. That has all worked (including creating backups on yet another external drive of everything, as I went on). Thank you all!AndyJones (talk) 14:26, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome. I've marked this question resolved. StuRat (talk) 18:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

How can I cancel saving a web page in IE?

Once I was saving a web page and it stucks, I cannot neither cancel the save nor close the window. Is there anyway to solve the problem?--Inspector (talk) 14:28, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

There is a program called "task manager" included with any even remotely recent version of windows. You can use this to terminate any application giving you trouble. i kan reed (talk) 17:36, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, then select Task Manager. Or, a faster way: Ctrl-Shift-Esc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by KyuubiSeal (talk • contribs) 20:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

comparison of web browsers ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:12, 17 June 2011 (UTC)