storage | The Tech Guy

Don't Rely on Time Machine for Your Only Backup

Apple's Time Machine works in a funky way, so go over to your local store and get a large 4TB (or bigger) drive. Also, get Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper program, which will make a bootable external disk that replicates the internal drive in your system. In case something goes wrong with your internal drive, reboot your Mac while holding down the "option" key, and boot the backup. The newest version 3.2.5 supports Mojave and includes their Smart Delete, Smart Wake, and Smart Update features.

Multiple Smaller Drives are More Reliable than 1 Massive Hard Drive

Leo advises to buy multiple smaller hard drives over one extremely large hard drive. The bigger the size, the higher the error rate...which can be catastrophic in the worst case scenario. In any case, move away from old spinning drives to faster Solid-state Drives (SSD), where the cost per gigabyte is getting conveniently cheaper. You may have so much storage in the future that you could forget to discipline yourself on cleaning out files!

What's better for a budget laptop, storage or speed?

Episode 1586

Richard from North Hills CA

Richard is in the market for a low priced laptop for $300-500. Leo says that SSDs are much faster and more reliable, but they are more expensive. Laptops with spinning drives are going to be cheaper and have more space than an SSD drive laptop. But sometimes they don't use an SSD, they use EMMC memory - the same memory on phones, so avoid that. It really comes down to how much data you want to store on it and what your needs are. Leo likes Thinkpads by Lenovo though as they're more though. For budget laptops, HP and Asus are good options as well to look into.

Why am I running out of storage?

Episode 1456

Holly from California

Holly is having issues saving files onto her hard drive and she's concerned that she may be running out of storage. Leo says that it's probably not the hard drive that's causing that — it's probably her cloud storage on Google Drive. She has a limited amount of storage online and if she's exceeding that, then she's going to have those problems.

Free Up Space on an Android Device

There are many inexpensive, or even free, Android phones being offered by carriers that may seem too good to turn down. Unfortunately, they may be too good to be true, though. Some of these phones are crippled with very limited internal storage space, and they may not even have an SD card slot for expansion. It's also important to remember that the actual usable space on the device will be less than what is advertised, because the operating system itself takes up space.

How can I clear up space on my iPhone?

Episode 1329

Leif from Winnepeg, Canada

Leif's iPhone is filling up and it has 128GB of storage! How can he clear it out? Leo says to use the cloud backup on the iPhone. It should manage that. Leo also recommends getting Google Photos and backing up all of his photos. He can get unlimited high quality backup and then he can delete them from his phone. There's even a setting for that.

How much storage does my mobile phone really have?

Episode 1303

Mark from Tustin, CA

Mark's son has an 8GB Samsung Android phone. How can he make more room on it? Leo says to do a factory reset. That will wipe the entire phone and leave just the operating system. From there, he'll have a good idea of how much room that phone really has on it. It won't be much. Apple doesn't sell 8GB phones anymore, neither do most of the Android makers. They're about to dump 16GB models as well.

Why am I running out of room on my iPhone?

Episode 1295

Dennis from Costa Rica

Dennis got an iPhone 6s Plus a few months ago and he can't seem stop the storage from filling up his phone. Leo says that the iPhone caches a lot of data. If he plugs it into his computer, he can take a look at it in iTunes. It will show him a graphical representation of the space used in "other." The only real way to clean it up is to backup the iPhone, erase it, and then restore it. That will get rid of all the cached stuff. He can go into Settings > General > Storage and Usage, and clear everything out piece by piece.

Dick DeBartolo, The Giz Wiz

Episode 1293

Dick's gadget this week is the SanDisk Ultra Dual USB 3.0 Drive. If you push the lever in one direction, you'll get the MicroUSB end that you can plug into your phone and it will show up as an additional drive. Then when you get back to the computer, if you push the lever in the other direction, you'll get a standard USB 3.0 end. For 32GB, it is $9.97. The 64GB version is $17.

This is a great solution for Android phones that don't have SD card slots. It does require that the phone be OTG-enabled.

Can I store apps on my miniSD card on my LG phone?

Episode 1294

William from Anaheim, CA

William's old 8GB LG G5 has filled up and he wants to add a miniSD card for storage. Can he add apps to the card as well as storage? Leo says that this is a common problem with Android and it largely depends on what flavor of Android he's using. For William, it's Lollipop. But even then, ideally, it gets confusing with the app and the phone. It could be different from app to app. So he'll need to go into the app settings and see if it supports it. There should be an option to move the app to the SD card.