How can I use CCleaner to clean an external backup hard drive?
What do you need cleaned on it (normal cleaning? Wiping the drive?
Just normal cleaning......
unless I'm mistaken, CC only cleans C:\ drive (or whatever your Windows drive is) and only for the current logged-on user.
to make it do anything extra would require INCLUDES (or maybe winapp2.ini).
but I'm confused about this backup drive.
if you are cleaning your PC and then backup that to the external drive, shouldn't the backup process reflect any changes onto the external drive?
that is, a file cleaned off the PC would then be cleaned off the backup drive during the next 'sync' or whatever backup process you follow.
at the end of the day, a true backup is a snapshot of the original.
maybe shed some more details on what exactly you want done to the backup drive.
The hard drive was removed from a desktop computer that I replaced with a new one. I never used CCleaner when it was in the computer from which it was removed.... I simply put it into an enclosure and am now using it as an external drive for backing up my financial files, such as Quicken.
I am using Carbonite to back up the current computer.
I was hoping to gain some additional disk space on the external drive by running CCleaner rather than wipe it clean and lose family photos that are on it.
Sadly think the best bet for you is to mount the drive temporarily as a system and run ccleaner from there
But that would leave the op system and all applications and all other user data intact. A better plan is to forget CCleaner and backup the pics to a few DVD's (that would be a good idea anyway, as the disk is old), create a folder under the root called c:\pics or something, move the pics under this new folder (it won't move the data, just the folder reference), and then delete everything else. All the space will be available then.
There are many ways of performing the above, do what you're happiest with.