Question about cleaning up small C Drive and Moving what I can to EVO250GB D Drive

[Dardwizzle]

Hi,

So I purchased a miniPC and love it but I have a question. It only came with a tiny 32GB C Drive, and it has an internal Drive Basked where I installed an EVO 250GB SSD. For the most part, I have it set for everything I can to goto the D Drive such as my Downloads, When installing Apps, where possible I switch the Drive letter from C: to D: etc. How ever one area that is taking up a massive amount of data is the "Old Windows Files" which I believe might be the files for where I would need to do a "reinstall of Windows" back to the original or "Factory Install" files, which are located in C:\windows.old. Since this is taking up 18GB of space, almost 1/2 of the total size of the C: Drive which is only 32GB in total. I did a full Copy and Paste of the C:\windows.old to D:\windows.old.

In Avast and I believe possibly CCleaner as well, I have the option to clear these old Windows files out which would simply delete the contents of C:\windows.old, would this be safe todo? If I were to run into an issue and needed to do a Factory Reset, or Reinstall Windows back to the default, is there anyway that I can point Windows to get the files from where I moved them in D:\windows.old or is Windows always going to look in C:\windows.old by default to find these files?

Is there perhaps an Environmental Path I can change which will point the Restore to look at D:\windows.old?

I would really like to reclaim those 18GB's to be used by the actively running Windows and to use that space for installing applications where it is best to leave them on the C: Drive for performance reasons, and I really don't think I will ever need to revert back to the "Factory Install" however, while I say that, the moment I go and delete the files I just know that something will happen and I will need those files, hence the reason I am asking if I can use them from a different location and or point some ENV Variable to get those files from D: instead of C:. I would really like your guys opinion on this. (PS - I am comfortable using Regedit or changing an ENV Variable if that would take care of what I do but I want to be sure that this can be done, and or should be done before I temp fate.

I look forward to your guys advice!

Thanks!

JD

 

[USAFRet]

windows.old can be removed via Disk Cleanup, directly within the OS.
And that is not really a backup. You can't keep that around forever for that purpose.

Yes it is safe to get rid of that, and you should.

You should also have an actual backup of this system.
Read more here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[Dardwizzle]

Oh, no worries there as far as a backup goes, I have 3 NAS devices, 2 Synology NAS (DS-218j and DS-718+) and one DLink NAS (DNS-325). The Synology NAS DS-718+ is my backup NAS that is configured with 2 6TB Western Digital Red's configured in Synologies Hybrid RAID which gives me a mirrored set. And it comes with a couple different back up options, so once get everything set up, I will not only have a backup (using one of their backup solutions) but I will also have Cloud Storage to just copy whatever random files I want on there, but also a virtual folder that I can use so that all my downloads from my browsers will go to a download folder which automatically syncs over to the NAS.

As well (and I hope I can do this), I tried it once before with my laptop and I couldn't figure it out, but I would like to have my restore points saved to a folder on my NAS as well, but last time I tried this on my laptop, where I took went to the directory on my laptop where the restore points were supposed to be saves, and I created a symlink on to my NAS so they would go on the NAS instead of the laptop, they never showed up in the local directory nor the NAS, so I am not sure what happened there. I would like to have them stored on the NAS since they can be rather large. Some how I would like them to get to the NAS, but I will need to research again where they are stored locally and get them to save on the NAS..

Bottom line, yes I agree 100% about having a backup, and I will have one as soon as I get back to setting up the Mini PC again

Cheers!

 

[USAFRet]

I have all my 'downloads' go direct to the NAS, via a mapped drive letter. No symlink needed.

N = a designated space on the NAS, and then sub/sub folder in there.

Restore Points? There are much better options for that functionality.
Mentioned in the link above.

 

[Dardwizzle]

Sorry, for the confusion and misleading statement there, I have been up all night writing reviews (for free hardware and commissions ), so my mind is a little scrambled. I should probably take a break soon!

I did not mean to state that I has created symlinks for the browser downloads, they are already pointing to the NAS from the settings with in the browsers, what I was referring to, or should say what I had created the symlink for was the restore points, because I was unable to find anywhere that specifies where you save the restore points to. When I go into the dialog box to turn on the restore points, you can specify the name, and the size on disk, but I was unable to find a way to specify where you wanted them to be created, so I have googles where the restore points were saved on the hard drive (and while I don't recall where it said it was), I created a symlink to the folder where they were said to be created and saves, and pointed that to the NAS folder.

Again, I agree there is probably a much better way of doing this, however, that was the last time I had looked into that and it did not work. My intention has been to take another look into that and see if I could find a better solution, however, I haven't gotten around to that yet. When I was looking into this is was over 6 months ago, and then I had a spinal infection and broke 2 vertebrae in the back... I was in the hospital and a rehab facility for over 6 weeks, and have not looked into it since then. In fact, had I not purchased this miniPC, I likely would not be discussing this ATM, which means that as soon as I get a couple other things finished, I will be once again researching that for a much better solution.

I am quite sure that you already know the solution, but unless you are willing I wasn't planning on bothering anyone to ask, I was going to take a different approach to trying to find a solution which likely would bite me right in the nads, if I looked well enough again, and my current plan is to do just that.

There is apparently a way to configure the minipc to use the expansion drive as either a replacement for the 32GB ROM (which by default is the C Drive) or to just expand the 32GB ROM with the SSD, again, this is something I have to research sometime this weekend as I really want to take the time to learn all these little things through proper research as that got severely interrupted when I became the victim of my own immune system and then breaking my back... I will be back on that bucking bronco this weekend to research all of this. Any way, for the expansion drive, (which i was just speaking about, I am using my Samsung EVO 250GB SSD in the slot which connects to the main board via an mSATA port.

So again, sorry for the confusion on that. That was silly of me to have written that the way I did and have you waste your time responding to me. I do apologize. (I should learn to proofread especially when I have not been to bed yet working on these reviews

Cheers!

 

[USAFRet]

The braindead functionality of the Restore Points built into Windows is why I don't use it.

I'm not sure if there is a method to cause those to go to some other drive.
And if there were, not sure how to access it when you need to.

That's why I use a 3rd party tool, Macrium Reflect, for the whole backup/restore function.
You can make that go to any drive you want, internal or external.


For your 32GB C drive...I have an Asus Transformer with a similar drive.
I just leave the OS on it, and cause most everything else to go to the 64GB microSD card, or to the NAS.