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2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
We clean the mail, tidy up Google Photos and find the heaviest files in the cloud.
Google recently changed the policy for storing photos in Drive, which can cause free storage in the cloud to disappear much faster. If you receive a notification that your 15 GB is already running out, it's time to clean the storage from garbage and delete all unnecessary ones.
What can take up space on Google Drive
If you don't use Drive to store your personal files that you manually upload to the cloud, you might still gradually run out of free space. It is eaten by:
- emails and attachments from your Gmail account;
- photos and videos from Google Photos, if the sync function with Google Drive is enabled;
- Android smartphone backups and data;
- Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, ZIP archives, and anything else you add from other users' links.
To find out what exactly fills your "Google Drive", open the special service Google One. There, under the offer of the tariff plan, there will be a visual scale.
How to get rid of unnecessary data on Google Drive
1. Delete unnecessary letters
If you have been using Gmail for a long time at work, then deleting letters will greatly relieve your Disk. First, check the folders "", "", "" and delete their contents.
Next, parse the mail. The heaviest emails are those with attachments. To display them, enter has: attachment in the Gmail search bar, click Contains Attachments, select and delete anything you don't need.
With the help of "Advanced Search" you can display all letters whose size exceeds, for example, 3 or 5 MB, as well as display mail for a certain period. This will get rid of heavy and very old letters.
2. Remove unnecessary media files from Google Photos
When the function of synchronization with Google Photos is turned on, all pictures and videos from your smartphone's camera are stored in Drive. To make them take up less space, it is worth lowering the quality of the downloaded files. To do this, open Google Photos and turn on compression.
In the same place, in the "Unsupported videos" settings item, you can go to the list of clips that cannot be played, but they take up memory space. These are, for example, application files or automatic entries, which can also be completely disposed of.
You will have to clean the Google Photos library manually by looking through all the downloaded images and removing unnecessary ones. The section "" will help a little to facilitate this task. It provides access to a selection of potentially unnecessary files, including screenshots, blurry photos and very heavy videos.
After cleaning, do not forget to delete everything from the Google Photos Trash, because the files in it also take up space in memory.
3. Delete data from Android applications
Disk may contain data from mobile applications that you deleted a long time ago, including from old, no longer used smartphones. Typically, such data weighs about 1 MB, but there are exceptions weighing tens of times more.
To check for such files, go to Settings and select "Manage Applications". Scroll through the list and see if there is any useless stale data taking up space in the cloud.
4. Delete heavy files
Now that you've cleared your emails, photos, and app data, it's time to check the files you've manually uploaded to Disk or received from other users. To go directly to the heaviest files, open the service settings and select "" from above.
Clicking to open a list of all your files sorted by weight. The most difficult and not the most valuable for you can be deleted. And if you don't want to lose something, you can transfer it to your PC, freeing up space on Disk.
5. Clean up the Google Drive Trash
The final step of cleaning up the cloud should be cleaning Google Drive. It contains all the files that you deleted within the last 30 days. When more time passes, the files are erased automatically.
To delete everything at once, click on the "Empty Trash" button in the upper right corner.
Please note that sometimes there is a delay in recalculating free space on Google Drive. Therefore, after all the manipulations, it may take some time for the service to display more free memory.
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