Freeing up space on your computer's internal drive - Lightroom Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, I'm going to spend a little time on desktop computers, laptop computers. You know, the stuff that sits on our desk or on our laps, and the good stuff, right? The heavy metal. And when I think about these devices, I really think about two different types of storage. The storage that's inside the computer. In this case, the internal hard drive, right? It could be SSD, or it could be spinning platter. And then, external storage, and it could be an external drive plugged in, or it could be cloud storage, or it could be both. And the reason why I have to think about both of them is because the internal storage is my working storage. This is not where you back things up. If you have a folder of work, and then you make a copy of it, and it lives on the same drive as the original folder of work, that is not a backup. That is a copy, (laughs) right? That has to move somewhere else. Now, the big challenge with our internal drive is keeping this, right? Making this right here as big as possible. Right now, I have 265 gigabytes of free space on this drive. That is not a lot for what I do. I want this to be bigger. I want over here all these colors to shrink, and I want the white to grow. Now, the way that I can do that is by moving some of this content onto other places. So, I can move some of it here to the LaCie, and now I have it in one other spot. Do I sleep great at night if it's just in one other spot? Not really, right, because what if something happens here. What if someone breaks into my house, steals my computer, and steals this as well? That's not so good. Suddenly, I have not really backed up correctly, have I? Another way to go, of course, in addition to something that you plug in is your cloud storage. Now, I'm in the Apple ecosystem, so I use iCloud. If you're in a Windows ecosystem, you have all sorts of options as well. There's all sorts of services. Really, what you want to do is pick one that just works well with your work. Works well with your hardware, your software. That's why some people like Adobe Creative Cloud because they're into Photoshop and Lightroom, and it just works well with their work. So, find one that well with your work, and then don't be cheap on how much you buy. In this case, I have two terabytes of cloud storage, and the reason why I do that is because this stuff over here that I need to back up to here, I also want to back it up to here. And the way I have iCloud set up is that my desktop and my documents folder automatically go into iCloud as well as my photos and my music, so that stuff just goes there. I don't have to think about it, and that is the best system. Now, you're thinking, well, how much information can live on your desktop or in your documents folder? How many photos can you really do? I mean, photos isn't even really my main app, right? Capture One and Lightroom are my main apps. This is my fun app, this is where my fun shots go, and look. I still have 22,886 here, and I don't want to lose 'em because that's like friends, and family, and having fun. That's not my work, and in the end, those are the photos often that we miss the most when we have some sort of break down in our system. And let's take a look at the desktop folder here. 95 gigabytes, (laughs) not megabytes. 95 gigabytes in that desktop there. In my dropbox, 70 gigabytes. In my movies, 192 gigabytes. This stuff adds up quickly, and the only way that we're going to have a chance of increasing this white area here in our working drive, in the internal drive on our computer, is to have a system of moving stuff from here not only to one place, but also to another. If we have it in two spots, then I can sleep easy at night, and then I feel okay about taking that content off my working drive.