It finally happened. After basking in the idea that my local disk space was unlimited, I finally hit the wall.

It started with the computer in the observatory. I was taking AVIs of Jupiter, and it was taking a long time to allocate disk space and then started giving warnings about lack of space. This is a relatively small (80 GB, small by today’s standards, anyway) drive. I started to move older data to the second drive on that machine, a 40 GB drive. Problem solved, I thought.

Not so fast. After a few minutes, I got a warning that the second drive was short on space. The move aborted, I was OK with about 10% free on the working drive. Over full by my standards.

Then things went from bad to worse. Or the problem got broader, anyway. I noticed that my main drive on my main desktop machine, a 160 GB drive, was down to 7 GB. Given that I was moving around 800 MB AVIs, that is full for all practical purposes.

Today I cleaned things up. The Observatory computer is still fairly full, but not critical. I compressed 60 GB of AVIs and freed up about 35 GB. Some AVIs compressed by 96% (small object in a dark sky, no doubt). I did a directory command and sent it to a text file via “>”, created a macro to change the file name into the commands I needed, and it ran for several hours. I am now at 56 GB free, a little over 30%. I have breathing room, but I think the next computer will need a terabyte, and I should get another external drive!