How to Free Up Google Drive Space

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How to Free Up Google Drive Space

When it comes to having a secure place for storing your important files and data, you can think of nothing better than Google Drive. It is a phenomenal cloud storage platform offering probably the largest storage space for free. You can save up to 15GB of data on Google Drive, free of any cost. However, that’s really a lot more than the space you get in other cloud storage such as Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

However, even with that huge storage available on Google Drive, you often see the storage space running out. This leaves you wondering as to where the storage is being used. Well, here’s the fact. When you look at the 15GB storage in Google Drive, it does not include only the files that you directly upload on the drive.

Instead, this space takes into account anything you have uploaded on Google Photos. Moreover, it takes into consideration of the space taken by the emails and attachments in your Gmail account. So, that’s where your space gets used up.

What Can we do to free up Google Drive Space?

Now, the thing is that with all this used up space; you get into a sort of fix as to where to save your other important files and data. Additionally, if there’s no space in your Google Drive, you shall not be able to receive any more emails on your Gmail account.

Now, you need to tackle these situations. And for that, you can buy more storage space on Google Drive, but that’s a really costly solution. A better option yet is to free up Google Drive space.

Obviously, you do not need all those emails and attachments taking up the limited storage space you have. Additionally, you can always move the photos to some other storage.

The bottom line is that you need to make sure that you are using safe and secure storage like Google Drive only for the most important files and data, and all other things can be cleared up to free the space in there.

The question is, how to free up Google Drive Space? Well, this tutorial carries all the answers you need. So, have a read further.

Read How to Stop Google Drive Notifications

How to Free Up Google Drive Space?

Well, there are several ways to free up Google Drive space, considering that the entire storage is shared among various Google applications.

Majorly, your drive space is taken up by the files you upload on Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail account.

So, you need to manage the data in all these three applications to ensure that nothing unnecessary is holding up the space on your drive.

Hereinbelow, we shall explain everything that you could do to free up the Google Drive space.

Clean Up Your Google Drive Files and Data

The first thing that you could do is directly clean up the unimportant files and data in your Google Drive. Follow the steps explained herein below for the purpose.

  • Open your Google Drive.
  • To make things easier, select the “List View” for your files.
  • Once you select this view, you can see all the files on your drive listed with their respective names. Now, the thing is that you cannot directly see the storage space taken up by the files. However, when you click on the “Storage” option in the bottom left corner of your screen, you will see all the files in your Google Drive along with the storage space they have taken up.
Free up Google Drive Space

However, when you are cleaning up your Google Drive, you cannot just go ahead and blindly delete the files and folders that don’t seem important. That’s because, while there are many things Google Drive includes in its storage space, it excludes some things as well.

As such, your Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides that appear in your Google Drive are not really counted towards storage space usage. So, you can leave them out when deleting files and folders from your Google Drive.

Also check, How to Restore Text Messages from Google Drive

Clean Up Google Photos

You may have uploaded some photos on Google Photos. Or, possibly the photos from your phone gallery may have automatically backed up into this application.

Whatever be the case, these photos are taking up space in your Google Drive, which makes it imperative to clean up the application.

You can follow the steps below to clean up Google Photos-

  • Open Google Photos on your device.
  • Move your cursor to any photo that you want to delete; you will see a checkmark on the top left corner of the photo. Click on it. You’ll then see an option to select all the other photos as well.
  • Select the photos you want to delete. Now, click on the “Delete” button on the top right corner of the screen.
how to free up google drive
Tap on Delete Icon
  • The application will ask for confirmation. In that, click on the “Move to Trash” button.
how to clean up space on google drive
click on the “Move to Trash” button
  • Once you have moved the photos to the bin, go ahead and delete the photos permanently from the bin as well.

That’s all. You shall see the storage space freed up on your Google Drive after some time.

Read Why is Google Drive So Slow?

Clean Up Your Gmail Account

Let’s face it; you have too many unwanted and unimportant emails in your Gmail account. Now many of them can contain attachments that are taking up space on your Google Drive. The best way to free up your Google Drive space shall be to get rid of these kinds of emails.

You can just select the emails and delete them altogether. Moreover, you can unsubscribe to unwanted newsletters to keep your inbox cleaner.

This shall also help you organize your emails, and you shall be in better control of your messages and other business emails and communications.

Related Google Drive tutorials:

Final Words

So, that’s all about cleaning up your Google Drive Space. We hope that you found the article helpful and are now better at tackling the storage space on your Google Drive.