what is the best and safest way to format a storage drive

I have my OS on an SSD and then I have 3 2 TB hard drives that I use to have a triple redundancy backup. I have one drive I save everything to and then I use a program called GoodSync to back up that main drive to two other drives. It is a bit overkill but I know I will have to have 3 drives fail at the same time to lose everything so it works for me.

Windows 10 is seeing my drives incorrectly when I select all folder in each of the 2 backup drives it says 442 GB of used space my main one says the same, however when I right click the drive letter and select properties it says the 2 backup drives have 875 GB of used space and 829 GB of used space.

I verified that the folders all have the same things in them as they should because they are clones of the main drive.

I need to format the 2 backup drives and then use GoodSync to copy the data to each drive so Windows 10 reads my drives properly.

What is the easiest and best way to format the storage drives so I can start off with "empty drives" I know they won't be "empty" but you get what I mean?

Thanks in advance

Caledon Ken said:

Hi Eaglepi.

If you right click on the drive you will get the option to format. Now the question then becomes do you do a "Quick" format or full.

A quick will take minutes, a 2TB several hours. I just did a low level format (Full) on a 4TB in USB external enclosure which took two days.

You could also enter Disk Management and delete the partitions on the drives, create new and then format, quick or full.

While your premise of having three drives will protect you from physical drive failures it will not protect you from Ransomware and other data damaging routines (viruses) if they are all connected and online when in use. To be really protected you should have an offline device that is not stored right beside your main computer. (Fire, theft, water damage).

Ken

Thanks for your reply Ken,

I am well aware of the risk of Ransomware and other data damaging routines (viruses) and scan my system regularly. My goal is to correct the wrong info windows is giving me about my drives, the only way I thought of was to format the 2 storage drives and then use GoodSync to copy files from the main storage drive to the 2 backup drives.

Quick vs full, pros and cons for each ????

Hey Eaglepi,
Grab WizTree (Portable Zip) and see what it says, just for a sanity check :)
Antibody Software - WizTree finds the files and folders using the most disk space on your hard drive

The _gsdata_ folder is part of that GoodSync program. I'm not familiar with that program, so can't comment

Eaglepi said:

I now see my problem in my main drive D the _gsdata_ folder...

GoodSync FAQ said:

Q: Why is hidden _gsdata_ folder in the left and right sync folders so big?
A: Because _gsdata_\_saved_ folder keeps the last version of all files that GoodSync deletes or replaces, if option Job -> Options -> General Save Previous Versions of Files is checked. If you believe that you do not need these previous versions of files then:
- Uncheck option Job -> Options -> General Save Previous Versions of Files.
- Delete folders _saved_ inside folder _gsdata__ in left and right sync folders.
- Do NOT delete folder _gsdata_ itself, GoodSync keeps state of synced files there.

https://www.goodsync.com/faq

Bree said:

https://www.goodsync.com/faq

Thanks for the link, I found it also and I submitted a support ticket to GoodSync to see if it is needed or not. I don't see why it is or if it is it should be the same size as that folder in my main storage drive D which the other 2 are copies of.

Thanks again for the link !!