TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Checking the "fullness" of your TuneBacker drive

TuneBacker doesn't zap files from backups, ever. That assures you have a fallback copy of files in case you decide you made a mistake a few days ago when you deleted a file from your main drive. But that means your backup drive will eventually fill up. Here's how to know that's happening.

If your setup is typical, you will have a "Disks" icon your desktop. If you don't, then your boot drive will be shown as an icon right on your desktop. But let's assume for this illustration that you DO have a Disks icon. If you double-click to open Disks, you'll see your main drive icon, which might be called Haiku®1, Haiku®, boot, ZETA, or something else, depending on the age of your installation. That's your mainternal drive. Not normally visible is your Backup drive, but it can easily be displayed. Leave your Disks window open, but push it off to the side, right-click on your desktop wallpaper background, and move your mouse over Mount. A submenu should show an item called Backup or Backup1. Left-click on it, and it will appear in the Disks window (or on the desktop if you don't have a Disks option).

If your system is fairly recent, you'll notice a little thermometer next to the icon for the backup drive. thermometer shows graphically how much space you're using, and how much is left. If you're running out of room, thermometer will display in red rather than green. If your icon doesn't have a thermometer, right click its icon and choose "Get info." There, you can view the exact amount of space being used, and how much is left, expressed in megabytes or gigabytes, depending on the operating system version you have.

If you're starting to get overly full, it's time to clean house! Next time, we'll tell you how to clear some space on your backup drive.

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