- Optimize, clean, protect and speed up your Mac. Inject instant speed into your machine by removing the unnecessary files taking up room on your hard drive. Clear out errors and broken settings to improve stability.
- Reduce your Google Drive cost by removing the clutter from your account. Unlimited Scans of your Google Drive account. View Duplicate Files, Large Files & Empty Files.
Google Duplicate Finder
How to clear your Google Drive storage. (Express Photo: Mohammad Faisal)Many of us rely on cloud storage to save important documents and files. Google gives you 15GB of free space in Google Drive and while it seems like a lot, there’s a catch. The 15GB space is not only for the files you upload on Drive but also for Gmail and Google Photos.
Clean Drive is the ultimate duplicate finder and sweeper. It will free space in your account allowing you to stay productive, optimize your storage space, and ultimately reduce your costs.
The messages and attachments sent or received using your Gmail account as well as all the photos that you upload in original quality on Google Photos share the same storage. Depending on your use, the 15GB space could exhaust quickly and then you won’t be able to receive emails.
When you approach your 15GB limit on Google Drive, you can either buy Google’s premium plan or clear your storage. While the first option will cost you money, the second one is free and needs only a few minutes. Here’s how you can clear your Google Drive:
How to free up Google Drive space
You can head over to drive.google.com/settings/storage 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 break up of the used space.
How to check your available space on Google Drive. (Express Photo)If the majority of your free space is consumed by Drive, then proceed to clear the Drive storage:
*Go to drive.google.com/drive/quota, 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.
Clear Gmail and Google Photos space
In case your Drive space is blocked by Google Photos and Gmail, you need to clear them as well. For Google Photos, it is better to change your photos and videos from “Original quality” to “High quality” for unlimited storage space in the Photos app. Also, go to Settings in Google Photos and click on “Recover storage” to claim back the space taken by current uploads.
Google Classroom
Also read | You can now find COVID-19 testing centres on Google Search, Assistant and Maps
Google Drive Cleanup
To save space on Gmail, type “has: attachment larger:10M” in the search box and click search to see all the emails with attachments taking space larger than 10MB. You can replace the digit as per your liking to find big files on email and clear them up. Also, do not forget to clear your Trash folder.
Four Quick Tips to Clean Up & Unclutter Your Google Drive
Google Drive Cleaner
Cloud-based file share and storage platforms like Google Drive can make our lives easier, but often they don’t because they swell into a chaotic repository of files with no reason or rhyme. In the workplace, the ability to collaboratively access and change work-in-progress files is invaluable, and something that 67% of organizations deem to be business- and mission-critical.Content Collaboration and Access is Mission Critical for 67% of CompaniesThe following are a few I recommend to help you gain control over Google Drive and other cloud-based file-sync-and-share (FSS) platforms.Multiple versions of the same file? Locate the two most recent versions and open them in separate tabs. Utilize Google Drive’s revision history to determine what changes were made between the two, and delete the outdated duplicate.If a file hasn’t been modified in 6 months or longer, is it still relevant today? Are there files stored that are related to long-completed projects? Can they be archived in another system and removed from your cloud storage drive? I prefer to start in ascending order and work my way toward more recent files. It’s much easier to weed out older files that are clearly no longer relevant or useful.TIP: Define a retention period for your Google Drive moving forward, and set a repeating calendar reminder to review files on your Drive.Separate work files from personal files, if you store any of the latter on your Google Drive account. Create and use one umbrella folder for your organization. Move the non-duplicate files that haven’t been modified in 6 months into an Evaluation folder, to be addressed with necessary team members to determine whether it can beIf files on your Google Drive tend to serve an ephemeral purpose, you may want to create quarterly folders dating back to the oldest, still-relevant and critical content. If your role interfaces with numerous teams and departments, you may want to develop a taxonomy similar to your company’s structure.TIP: To learn more about the importance of Taxonomy to manage the ever-growing volume of information flow, watch our webinar on Taxonomy here.The easiest way to move forward after this is to identify what types of files you store on your Google Drive, or other cloud-based shared drive, and who needs to access it. Using Google Drive’s Folders, you can share only the content your team members need to access, and set edit/view permissions.While Google Drive and other similar products, like Dropbox and Box, can provide many of the functions you need to manage digital files, it’s often not an ideal solution at an enterprise level. The security levels may be subpar for your company, and as it’s stored on Google’s vast shared cloud, your IT team can’t effectively audit how data is being stored.When uncluttering your Google Drive, you should contact your Information Management and IT teams, and review their policy of shared drive usage. They may have a policy in place, but many companies, including 27% of companies surveyed still do not. Of those with policies in place, 26% of companies say they restrict network access to the most likely applications, like Google Drive and Box, while 17% say the policies are actively circumvented by employees.27% of companies don’t have any policies in place on the use of Google Drive or other cloud-based file share and storage services.Without some type of process and policy in place for governing cloud-stored data, it puts the entire organization at risk if anything happens to go awry.In terms of effective management and control of business-critical content, enterprise companies should move away from cloud-based file share usage, like Google Drive and Box, and onto a secure and flexible enterprise content management platform. Many ECM companies lend more control over information storage and management through both a cloud-based SaaS option and on-premise hosting on a private server in a company’s datacenter.Regardless of your cloud-based file sharing platform or hosting solution, you need to regularly chip away at any clutter or data rot, and ensure that all necessary teammates have access to the files they need. Developing a strategy to tackle the clutter that accumulates on FSS platforms, like Google Drive and Box, will make your day-to-day and long-term management of content far simpler.If you have any questions about this post, contact the author at mktg [at] filetrail.com. If you’d like to learn more about FileTrail’s Enterprise Content Management platform, please get in touch: