How To Clean Up Your Google Drive Storage To Start The New Year Right

So, you’ve gotten a lot of emails over the years, taken many photos and videos, and dumped a bunch of content into Google Drive. Subsequently you've gotten a warning that your storage space is running out, and while that may be a ploy to get you to buy an upgrade, that many not be necessary. You most likely can take command of your Google storage and clean it up, to free up plenty of space. There are a few easy ways to go about this, so you don’t have to pay the $1.99/month fee to get 100GB of storage through Google.

First off, there are probably plenty of spam emails and other miscellaneous things clogging up your Gmail inbox. A good place to start your digital Spring cleaning is by using the advanced search in Gmail to find emails with attachments larger than say 2MB, which can add up quickly.


To further purge your storage, navigating to the Google One homepage to see how you can clean up your Drive is another good step. Here, you can click the “Clean up space” button, which gives you the ability to quickly review spam emails, emails with large attachments, and larger stored files like, high-resolution photos or videos.


When I took a look at m account, I found that I had a bunch of gaming videos saved in my Drive, taking up close to 9GB of space. I plan to pull these from Google and save them onto the 2TB drive I keep as cold storage, which used to be one of my main operating drives, but now lives in a Sabrent USB drive bay. You could also snag a deal on an SSD external drive for a little more money if you do not already have some spare storage lying around.

Whether you delete content or back it up offline, keeping your Google Drive storage clean and organized and with enough headroom to receive emails and backup important data from your phone is probably a good idea. Plus, you never know when you'll need to share a large file or something else that may occupy significant storage space. Between that and the fact that emails will continue to pour in, sing below the 15GB limit, so you do not have to upgrade.