External hard drive mirrors my laptop

[rich24]

I have an (old now) iBook G4 with the Tiger operating system (so no Time Machine) and have connected a 2TB WD Elements external hard drive, mainly for the purpose of saving my iPhoto and iTunes collections, so that I can delete some of them from my laptop's hard drive and free up space on it.

I have followed all of the tutorials as to how to do the above, and all goes fine until I start to delete photos or songs from the laptop. Whichever songs or photos I delete from the laptop also disappear from the external hard drive. I have tried disconnecting the external h/d whilst deleting stuff and then re-connecting it, and lo and behold, whatever stuff I have deleted from the internal hard drive has gone from the external one too.

Please tell me what on earth I am doing wrong? Many thanks.

 

[zurichuk]

Are you using the supplied WD Backup program that comes with the disk?

If so, check what you have set for Purge Deleted Files in the Preferences.

 

[rich24]

Thank you for your reply Zurichek, and apologies for a tardy response. There wasn't any disk. I just re-formatted it to work on a Mac, plugged it in and my laptop recognised it all but unfortunately when I delete a file on my internal hard drive, having saved it on the external h/d, it disappears from the external h/d too - photos, songs etc

Any thoughts?

 

[Spikestrip]

Are you deleting the files through Finder, or in iTunes and iPhoto themselves?

 

[rich24]

I'm deleting individual songs through iTunes, individual photos through iPhoto and other files eg Word documents etc through simply dragging them to the Trash. Grateful for any thoughts.