external hard drive issues

[aussielee]

I have a 500 gig ext harddrive. Partitioned about 200 and 265. I am using it to back up w/time machine.

Run out of space. erased one side still says only 1.7 gig available. What is the deal?

 

[gr8tfly]

How did you erase it? If you used the Trash, did you remember to empty it?

(And then the light came on...) I'm going to guess you erased the partition you were not using for Time Machine, and the TM partition free space remained unchanged. TM will not backup across partitions, so you would need to delete the unused partition, then add the free space to the Time Machine partition.

If possible, you should make an image backup of your internal drive on a second external, before making any partition changes to your external drive (under the 'stuff' happens rules).

 

[aussielee]

Sorry for the delay in replying earlier. Nah, you were right the first time. Stupid beginner mistake of not emptying trash, but it was huge so it took about an hour to empty.

My biggest hassle now is trying to tidy up my harddrive. It is 250 gig, but I only have about 8 gig free. I think I probably need some sort of a programme to tidy up.

I am too much of a novice to go messing around too deeply without good advice.

I have run disk utilities and repaired all permissions, but if there are more than 2 programmes open things really slow down.