What do I do when my external hard drive is full?

External hard drives have been widely used in our daily life and work for many years. As a traditional storage device, many users back up files, folders, photos, and even backup entire computer to external hard drive for computer data security. After that, you can carry your external hard drive everywhere and then access or share your computer data on any device after connecting the external hard drive to it properly.

Since we get to back up more and more data to external hard drive, after prolonged use, you may encounter that your external drive is full. If you want to continue using your external hard drive, what to do when your external hard drive is full? We will give you 4 advice in the following part.

How to solve the external hard drive full issue

When you find that “my external hard drive is full”, there are mainly two ideas to solve such a problem: you can free up storage space to get more available space in the external hard drive or move data from the external hard drive to a larger storage space.

We will introduce different solutions in the following section, and you can choose the most suitable method for your external hard drive after learning them.

Solution 1. Check hidden files in external hard drive

Sometimes, you think there are not many files in your external hard drive and your external hard drive full for no reason. Maybe you can check if your files are hidden. Then you can make your decision to remove them or not.

To see your hidden files on the external hard drive, you can refer to the easy guideline as follow.

1. Click on the This PC icon on your computer. Then open your external hard drive.

2. On the top of the window, click on the View tab, then tick the box in front of Hidden items.

3. After the above, you can see all your files on the external hard drive including hidden files, folders, and drives. Then you can see if you need to remove some of them to solve the low disk space issue.

Solution 2. Delete unnecessary files permanently

The most direct method to free up storage in an external hard drive is to delete unnecessary files permanently. Once you delete files on the computer, they will be put into the Recycle Bin folder. Thus, if you want to delete unimportant files in an external hard drive permanently, remember to empty your Recycle Bin.

Solution 3. Copy files to a larger drive

If you find that all files in the external hard drive are quite significant and can not be deleted, you may need a larger external hard drive, and copy files to a larger storage space.

Solution 4. Backup external hard drive to cloud

However, storage in an external hard drive is not flexible and scalable so you will use the larger external hard drive one day. To solve the issue completely, you can back up the external hard drive to the cloud, then you can remove data from external hard drive to get more available storage space.

For this, we highly recommend you a free cloud backup service - CBackup. CBackup provides 10GB of free cloud storage space in its CBackup Cloud for each account. You can choose to back up the external hard drive to CBackup Cloud directly.

In addition, many popular cloud drives are supported in it. Thus, you can backup external hard drive to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more.

In CBackup, you can choose any type of data to back up, such as files, folders, pictures, videos, programs, entire external hard drives, and even the whole PC cloud backup.

Here is an easy guideline to back up an external hard drive to the cloud via CBackup. We take Google Drive as an example, but you can choose any cloud drive as the backup destination for your data.

1. Download and install the CBackup desktop client on your computer. Sign up for a new CBackup account, then launch the desktop client to log into it.

2. Click on Storage on the left side. For example, choose Google Drive > Authorize Now. Please follow the clear instructions to give CBackup authorization to access your Google Drive account.

3. Under the Backup tab, click the Backup PC to Public Cloud option.

4. Task Name for your backup can be changed as you like, then you can choose data from an external hard drive as the backup source, and select the Google Drive account you just added to CBackup as the backup destination.

5. After the above, press the Start Backup button to back up your files from the external hard drive to the cloud directly and quickly.

What’s more, there are lots of valuable backup and sync features in CBackup. When you need them, you can try them for free. Let’s know something about them.

• Combine cloud storage: If you need unlimited upload storage, this feature can help you a lot by allowing you to merge unlimited cloud drive accounts to form a combined cloud.
• Cloud to cloud backup or sync: To move files between different cloud storage, you can try the cloud to cloud backup or sync feature in CBackup for free. Cloud drives including Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and FTP/SFTP are all supported in CBackup.

Written in the end

This post lists some useful solutions to the external hard drive is full issue. Among them, the free cloud service CBackup can help you back up external hard drive data to the cloud, which can free up more storage in external hard drives.