Jeff has a Microsoft Windows Surface Pro 2 and he wants to know how he can change out the storage memory for a larger one. Leo says that he can clean out the hard drive to get rid of unwanted cruft. Look for a folder called Windows.Old and get rid of that. Run Windows Disk Cleanup. Windows Key, cleanup.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
