Need help restoring full external HDD

flopear196208

Commendable
Feb 19, 2019
1
0
1,510
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron with Windows 10 Home and 8 GB RAM for storage.
I have a 1.0 TB Toshiba Canvio Slim II USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive that is over 90% full. What I would like to do is restore the Toshiba HDD to its original state - basically erasing all backed up files - and start over.
I have already run Disk Cleanup and Optimize and defrag; both made very slight difference in the available space of 124 GB.
I checked Compress the drive to save disk space, and it is in process now.

I thought I could simply reformat a disk to start over, but apparently I do not understand. I have an identical Toshiba for a separate Dell that I reformatted when it was at 40% capacity, but the app provided with the software (NTI Backup Now EZ 4) would not allow it to be used again after being reformatted. I connected the second Toshiba to the Dell Inspiron, but it would not run on it either. ??? I'm out of ideas.

Again, my primary request for help is this:
What I would like to do is restore the Toshiba HDD to its original state - basically erasing all backed up files - and start over.

Thanks for any help!
 
Do not compress the drive, it will slow things down and will add another point of failure that will risk loss of data.

If it has a special setup on the drive for backups and it's own software, you can check on the support for the drive online to see how to clear it. Some drives do have a setup where it runs their backup program and has hidden partitions for that. Or just select all the files in it and delete them manually that you see in the drive, just make sure you only touch what you added if you want the backup software still to remain.