Many hard drives - how to eliminate or reduce them?

[igmolinav]

Hi,

There is an icon that represents the hard drive of this computer I'm in.
It is located on the computer's desktop. Looking closely, one can see
that it is located near one of the corners of the screen. When I take a
screen shot, the computer automatically lays the screen shot
on top of the icon that represents the hard drive.

After one has taken a few screen shots, (perhaps done during a week
or perhaps during a day), one can not help, but notice, that the
hard drive's icon is totally buried with screen shots, and therefore
completely imperceptible.

Here is the thing that has happened to me. I created several folders.
These folders were meant to store about fifty to sixty screen shots.
When I had thrown-in every small-screen-shot-mountain into any
of the folders - unnoticeable to me - I had also thrown an icon of the
hard drive into one of those screen-shot-folders. Therefore, perhaps
putting extra weight into the computer's hard drive altogether,
because I don't know how heavy each of these icons is.

From having one hard drive icon, I went to five or six. I was able to
observe way later, that when one throws the icon into the folder, a
new one appears.

How do you suggest me to go about eliminating every additional
hard drive icon that has appeared, and any reapeating files that may
have come along with it?

Thank you, kind regards,

igmolinav : )!!!

 

[DeltaMac]

You can move that hard drive icon anywhere on the desktop. You absolutely don't have to leave it where your Mac puts it. If you move the icon to another part of the desktop, it will stay where you put it. You can even turn the icon off, so it doesn't appear on your desktop at all. This is just an icon. If you turn it off in Finder settings, you still have easy access to your hard drive from any Finder window.
I think it is unlikely that you copied files and folders, when all you did was copy the drive icon--unless the folder that you used was actually copying to another (external) drive. This needs to be investigated to verify that you haven't made a backup copy of your hard drive that you don't need. But, even if that happened, you would probably have noticed the extra time that took.