Help emptying Disk drive F

I recently was told by my computer I needed to backup my files. First I tried moving them to disc drive F but then it said that I had no more room. I tried compressing the files on F but it didn't work.
So I put my backup on dvds. My question, is how do I get that stuff off of drive F, I keep getting a baloon that says "You are running low on disc space on drive F" and it's annoying. Plus I don't need that backup stuff on F anymore. What do I do to empty it out, as it was before?
Thanks.

What is the size of your partitions? Maybe you need an external hard drive for your backups.

Hello wheeldog,

Welcome to the forums!

Take a look at this; there are a lot of options in this tutorial.

Disk Management - Delete and Extend

Let us know what you figure out.


Later Ted

Since that F: drive is a USB Flash device, from what I understood of your first post, you use it with Windows Explorer just like any normal hard drive - Computer --> F: --> delete files away.

Secondly, the main reason you are receiving this message is that you probably enabled ReadyBoost for UFDs at one point in time, and that is why you are getting the message, because ReadyBoost provides a quick way for extending your memory using the UFDs for 'extra' memory temporarily when needed. If you copied a lot of files to that UFD then there is no space for ReadyBoost to operate. However, deleting the files will take care of this message as it will get that space back.

Finally, if you used a *backup* *program* to backup the files to F: you'll need to use that backup program again to remove the backup on F: - ***make sure** those same files have already been backed up - they may not have been because the backup program sees them as being backed up on F:, and thus has not backed them up to DVDs.

Oh... I don't have much on this computer... and I did remove the partitions, the computer told me it would help but it didn't...

Hhhhmmm... I went to 'disc cleanup' and clicked on cleanup drive F, ... options... 'you can remove all but the most recent restore point...'
that seems to have worked...

No offense, but "I don't have much" is not a good enough answer - and understanding that you're new to the forums and such, ;et me take a little time to explain what I mean by that.

A lot of people here are good at helping folks, some are experts, some even at the level of Uber - but there remains one *major* obstacle to our solving computer problems here in the forum. 99.99% of the time we have no direct access to your computer - we cannot touch it, open it, run diagnostics, etc.

Thus, when we ask questions here, we need specific answers. Up in the thread, Michael asked how much space you have left - to that you should be opening My Computer and right clicking on your drive and seeing how much space it *available* - by know this information we can proceed.

Also, helpful in troubleshooting is to follow all steps exactly as listed, and if you get stuck in any particular step, ask away, being specific 0 for example, if you were doing the last part of my step, and you got lost as to what I meant by then you should do something like this:

You said above " ***make sure** those same files have already been backed up" - can you please explain that to me, because I am not sure I understand.

Finally, when going through steps, if you encounter a problem, or get stuck, you'll want to be specific again - something like this is a *bad* idea: "I was doing the backup and it failed."

A better answer is "When I was doing the backup, it got to XX% and then popped up an error that said "Invalid media - please insert a larger disc" - that lets us know *exactly what the problem was, and thus we can troubleshoot it better.

Again, I am not coming down on you, but trying to enlighten you as to how to communicate better with us - the better you communicate with us the better chance we have of helping you solve your problem and move forward with using your computer.

Now, back to your troubles - did you follow what I wrote, and are you performing the necessary actions? Also, when you originally said your computer told you that you need to back up your files, was this Windows, or another another program?

EDIT - Added the following:

If you had System Restore watching that drive, and have ReadyBoost, that is a bad thing....Are you sure that your F: drive is a removable USB Flash Device (aka thumb drive, key drive, etc.)? Also, please read the very last paragraph of my first response to you - it may still be applicable....