It is easy to have a hard drive get all messy and overflowing with the stuff that you may or may not need. You might load a lot of random stuff and forget about it over a time period. Therefore, it is wiser to clean-up your hard drive in a convenient interval. Here are few vital points to discuss about how to clean your hard drive.
A lot of desktop users and owners are not sure about how to erase pc hard drive. At the same time, they are equally confused regarding the necessity of erasing the drive. As a matter of fact, there are numerous reasons for erasing the hard drive of your computer.
It is essential to know about the various methods that will work in the best possible way. The common situation for erasing the drive occurs when you want to sell your computer. If you sell a computer, you are not giving it for a notable cause. Due to this reason, it is crucial to wipe out the personal information from that computer.
Contents
Look for the big files
It is advisable to look for the files that take up most of the storage space in the hard disk. By searching for these types of files you can save time by letting out the heavy load first. You can use different software do so. There you can look for Win-Dir-Sat which is useful and user friendly software that will help you find the huge files. There are colour codes for different types of files so that you can recognise which are important system files. Mac has a Disk Inventory X for such tasks and it is free.
Search for Duplicate Files
One important step of how to clean your hard drive is to search for duplicate files stored in the computer. This can be done with the help of Duplicate File Searcher which is a good tool. You do not need to go through every file and remember names of each and every file. If you have Windows OS you can go for Duplicate Commander which is a good tool for replacing duplicate files with hard links. This way you can save a lot of space on your hard disk. The apps on your system can keep running uninterrupted when you use this software to clean up the hard drive. Duplicate Cleaner Free is another good that has three tabbed system to clean your drive.
Renaming files
You might want to keep thousands of photographs of the special events of your life. But this may get you trouble in searching for them. You should try renaming the files instead of IMG124.jpg. This way you can keep your hard disk all neat and in line. You can use apps like Raid Stream for Windows and Name Changer for Mac to perform batch operations.
Hidden Files
You should use apps like 7-zip and TrueCrypt to lock down those sensitive files. You can hide these files and keep them neatly in the hard disk.Follow the above steps and see that your hard disk has more space than ever. You should do these steps in regular intervals so that you do not burden yourself with lots of files at once. This way you can keep all your important stuff and find it as and when required.
Use of software for cleaning files
It is necessary to erase the various components of hard drive if you are selling your computer to a person whom you don’t know. This means you have to remove the spreadsheet files, document files, financial programs, database files and other personal information. If you are able to remove this information successfully, it will be a wise decision to use a file removing software. This type of software helps to overwrite the entire space that is used by the previous files. It is due to the fact that the files may not erase properly from your hard drive. The unrecovered files are removed through this software.
These were the few vital steps of how to clean your hard drive, which anyone can do without any glitches.