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5 Ways To Free Up Storage Space On Your Google Drive

Written By AJ Viray
Published • February 20th, 2021
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Google Drive is an online storage solution launched by Google in April 2012. It’s primarily used for file storage and backup but is also a popular tool for project collaboration by businesses, schools, and individuals. Many of us rely on it to save our documents, but just like a physical hard drive on your computer, the space is not unlimited.

While other cloud storage offers greater cloud storage volume, Google Drive still provides free users with 15GB. Still, there’s a catch that the 15GB limit includes not only your Google Drive but also your Gmail account (messages and attachments) and Google Photos. So in case, you hit your free 15GB limit, here are 5 ways to free up your Drive space.

Table of Contents

1. Find the problem

Head over to the Drive storage page to see a pie chart distribution of your space used by Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. On the mobile application, tap on the hamburger menu icon in the Drive app > Storage > View details to see the used space’s breakup.

2. Find large files on Google Drive

Go to drive.google.com/drive/quota 11, which lists all the files saved on the Drive-in decreasing order of size. Select all the files that you want to remove. Move to Trash and then permanently delete them from Trash as well.

After you are done cleaning the space, the deleted items will show in the available space in your Google Drive account within 24 hours.

3. Find large attachments in Gmail

Open your Gmail on your computer. In the search box, type the following to search for large attachments: For example – size:15MB. Again, delete emails with large attachments that you no longer need. Empty the trash in Gmail to remove these items permanently.

4. Store files that use no storage allocation

Converting files, you store on Google Drive to native Google Docs formats can save significant space. Choose to convert files to a Google Drive format by default when you upload a Google Drive file.

Here’s how:

STEP 1: Go to https://drive.google.com
STEP 2: Click the “Settings” icon.
STEP 3: Make sure the box “Convert uploaded files to Google Docs editor format” is checked.

5. Fix your Google Photos

You can also reduce the storage space of videos and photos. From Google photos settings, choose “High Quality” to allow Google to reduce the file storage size of photos you save to Google Photos on the web.

So that’s it! We hope you find this helpful and let us know in the comments also what do you do when you run out of storage space.