I'm the "tech support" for an elderly woman who lives two states away. She has a Dell desktop machine that she "inherited" from a friend. A couple of years ago, I said something to her about backing up her documents and photos. She has Comcast as her ISP, and they offer the Norton Security Suite as a no-extra-cost service. Someone in her family, I think, set up NSS to back up her data to the D:\ drive, which, of course, quickly ran out of space.
I explained to her why it's not a good idea to use the D:\ drive for backup. She took my advice and bought a shiny new external hard drive. She now has the new drive handling the backup chores.
Of course, there's still the problem of some data files that clutter her recovery partition. She continues to get error messages alerting her that her D:\ drive is full. We'd both like to remove the old backup files from the drive, but I'm not prepared at this point to advise her. I don't have a Dell computer, and I haven't used Vista for years. So, I have two questions—
- What is the likely source of those nagging error messages about D:\ being full?
- How can we proceed safely to restore the D:\ drive to its original, pristine, factory-new status? Certainly, we'll find many obvious candidates for deletion, but how do we identify files that we absolutely must not touch?
Thanks for any advice!