*Headdesk*

To “Headdesk” is the action of banging your forehead against your desk in realization of something stupid you have done.

I’ve been running out of space on my computer. Local Drive C is a 50 gig hard drive, which sounds like a lot until you start editing books and layouts and photographs. About a year ago Howard and I bought an external drive to serve as a back-up for my files. So I happily put pictures and other non-essential stuff onto Backup Drive D, which had space for 18 gigs.

All was well and good until I filled up the space that I’d made on drive C.

Last night Howard suggested that I might make some more space if I flushed my browser cache because Kiki has been watching video on my computer. I blinked at him cluelessly. He sighed and went to my computer to do it himself. He flushed the cache and it made no difference. So he poked around some more.
“What is this?” Howard asked pointing at something labeled Local Drive F.
“I don’t know.” I blinked cluelessly again. “Do I have two internal drives?”
Howard clicked it and discovered that Drive F has over 133 gigs of available space on it. Further examination determined that despite having “local” in the name, Drive F is in fact the external drive that we’d purchased for backing things up. Drive D is a second internal hard drive.

This is akin to opening a door in your house and discovering that you have another whole wing that is three times the size of the space you’ve been living in.

Hurray for space! But *headdesk* how did I miss seeing it was there?

6 thoughts on “*Headdesk*”

  1. I actually have a drive like that, too, on my computer I bought from Dell about a year and a half ago. I’ve never used the backup drive, though. I still have yet to fill up my main hard drive anyway. I saw it there and disregarded it, so I can see how it would be easy to not notice it when you’re already expecting to see two drives. (They do show up slightly separated in the “My Computer” window, after all, with the internal drives next to each other and the external drives a little bit farther down.)

  2. GIP

    Just for the fun of it. 😀

    You reminded me: I seriously need to upgrade my RAM–I can’t run on 256 meg for much longer. XD

  3. The separation between the two kinds of drives was part of what confused me. I saw two drives and below them some other stuff that I mentally disregarded. Mostly though this is me just tuning out the aspects of computer stuff that I don’t understand. When people start talking about gigs and ram and servers and linux and etc, all of the sounds turn into a wash of “wah wah wah wah” like the voices of the adults on Peanuts cartoons.

  4. “Backup Drive D”

    For a while Dell was selling computers with a single hard drive pre-partitioned with a “backup” partition and the main partition, which would show up in Windows as two drives. So I have to wonder, does this Drive D really exist or is it a partition?

    (this from someone who currently has 2 partitions on his internal drive, and two external drives, each one of which is partitioned. One external drive is strictly for backups of the internal drive, while the other is my primary working drive. Internal drive is split into MacOS 9 for legacy applications that I still occasionally use, and MacOSX Tiger for the new stuff. Complicated, maybe just a bit… Sound and video editing results in some pretty massive files!)

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