How to increase Google Drive space for free

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Google Drive is a rather popular cloud storage among many users now. This service provides various useful options that can make your work more convenient and it constantly attracts new users.
In this article, we will analyze why Google Drive is so good, what opportunities it can provide us, and how to increase free space on it if you have already used your Google Drive free storage limit.
By default, the service gives you 15 gigabytes of free space for free. As you can imagine, this amount of Google Drive storage space available to you is quite large, but, nevertheless, not infinite.
If you, for example, prefer to store files not on your computer’s hard drive, but in Google Drive, then you may face the problem of lack of free space.
And here’s a question: how to free up space on Google Drive?
Of course, Google offers different subscription plans, but we will try to figure out other methods that will allow you to increase free space on Google Drive at no cost.

Use Google’s own file formats

One of the best features Google Drive can provide is uploading files in their original format. You don’t need to convert them, but if you want to increase free Google Drive space, we recommend you to store your documents in Google’s own file formats such as Sheets, Docs, Drawings, Slides, Forms and many others. The advantage of storing files in Google’s formats is that Google gives you free unlimited storage for these file formats.
google-doc-new-doc

Clean up Gmail

Of course, the emails don’t take up a lot of space in Google storage, but the attachments do.
You can clean your Inbox, Spam and empty your Gmail Bin to get more free drive storage.
Follow these steps to delete emails with large attachments that you no longer need:

  1. Go to your Gmail search bar and type “has:attachment larger:10M”.
  2. Here you will see emails with large attachments. Select the emails you no longer need and click the “Delete” button.
  3. Click “More” on the left sidebar (where you have Inbox, Sent, Draft, etc.) and select “Bin”.
  4. Click on “Empty Bin” at the top of the Bin page and confirm your action.
gmail-storage

Empty Google Drive Trash

You may not have known, but when you delete files from your Google Drive, they don’t disappear completely.
As soon as you delete them, they go to the Trash, where they accumulate over time, thus gradually depriving you of precious space.
Therefore, you should not forget to regularly empty your Trash to get more Google Drive free storage.
Follow these steps to increase free space in your Google storage:

  1. Open Google Drive, find the Trash in the left sidebar and click on it.
  2. You will see an arrow next to the word “Trash”. Click on it and select “Empty trash”.
gmail-storage

Don’t add shared files to your Drive

If someone shares their Drive files with you, they are not saved on your google Drive by default, unless you decide to save them on your Drive.
Therefore, in order to keep more free Google Drive storage, we recommend that you do not upload shared files to your Drive unless necessary.

Delete duplicate files

Of course, using a Google drive for storing files is very convenient. Sometimes when you move content from your hard drive to cloud storage, duplicate files appear if you accidentally moved them several times.
In fact, these duplicates can take up quite a lot of space, because sometimes they can simply not be noticed and not removed in time. And then you have the question “Why is my Google Drive full?”
Here’s a simple method that can help you delete duplicate files:

  1. Open your Google Drive and select “List View” in the upper right corner.
  2. You will see all your files in a list. It is not difficult to find duplicates, as their names start with “Copy of…” or they have the same number and name in the brackets. Now select all duplicates you no longer need.
  3. Right-click any of the selected files and click on the “Remove” button to delete all selected duplicate files.
  4. Go to the Trash and empty it.
find-duplicate-files-in-google-drive

Upload videos on YouTube

If you have videos on your Google Drive, you should know that they take up a lot of space. If you want to get more free Google Drive space, but still keep your videos files, you can upload them on YouTube and make them Private (if you don’t want anyone to have access to them) or Unlisted (if you want to share the URLs with your friends, family, etc.).
upload-private-video-on-youtube

Delete large files you no longer need

You can also search for unnecessary files yourself, and it is best to start with the files and folders that take up the most space in your free Google Drive storage.
To see a list of the objects that have the largest size, open this link in your browser: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
You will see the largest files at the top of this list. Now all you have to do is carefully review the files and delete the ones you no longer need.

Google Drive giveaway promotions

Not the most efficient, but quite an interesting way to get more Google Drive free space is to wait for Google to start doing free giveaways.
For example, in 2016, Google gave users 2GB of storage space for free if they improved the security of their Google accounts.

Conclusion

So, we have told you about all the methods to help you clean up used space and get more free space.
Of course, you can use them all together, or choose the ones you like the most.
In any case, these methods will be useful to you if you want to increase (free storage in Google Drive) instead of purchasing extra storage.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Start Dissy. The application will automatically open in the “Scan & Analyze tab”. There you will see a list of all drives connected to your computer. Click on the "Scan Storage" button next to the drive you want to scan, and the program will start scanning. To scan a specific folder, you can open it through the menu at the bottom of the window.
To fix this problem, open a terminal, enter «sudo nano /etc/hosts», then enter «127.0.0.1 localhost» and save.
Dissy is fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. So it can be used on almost any machine.
Yes, it is possible. To prevent the folder from being scanned, it must be added to the “Important” section. To do this, you need to scan the folder in which the folder you need is located, and opposite it in the menu select “Add to Important”. Thus, the selected folder will not participate in further scans, and you will not be able to accidentally make changes to it or delete it.