How to free up space in Google Drive

As you probably know, Google has recently united all the quotas allocated to users to store files in their services, one storage space of 15 GB. Thus, if you are actively using one of Google's services to store their data, then the allotted place for you could very quickly end. In this article you will learn how to brush your Google Drive and release precious space in the clouds.

To find out how much space you've used from the selected you in Google Drive, you can go to this link and hover over the pie chart. You will see a tooltip that shows the layout of each of the services.

clean Gmail

If you are a mail service with the experience, you have probably accumulated a considerable archive of letters. In itself, each letter takes a measly bytes, but if you have thousands and thousands of them, and even with large attachments, they can take place is not enough. Soft cleaning method is to search for all messages with large attachments. Make it very simple, and we wrote about it here here and here.

The second method is more radically and is refusing to use the Gmail web interface in favor of a desktop email client, such as Thunderbird. You configure it to receive e-mail from your account, and includes an option to delete messages from the server. As a result, there is an empty space in Google Drive and your zip file in the local form, which can be very useful in terms of privacy.

Convert files to Google Docs format

Google a bit confused all of us, are denoted by the same name are two different their service: online office suite, which we sometimes refer to the old Google Docs, and cloud storage for files such as Dropbox. But here's what you should know about Google Drive c point of view of reducing the space the files stored there:

• Files as Google Docs - Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, presentation, form - no space at all in the cloud. So keep it as much data in the Google naitivnyh formats as you like.
• All other files such as PDF, image, or Microsoft Word documents, occupy an appropriate place in Google Drive.

From this we can conclude that if you want to save disk space cloud, then when downloading any files are marked with option converting them to Google Docs formats.

Removing previous versions of files

Google Drive keeps older versions of files and they may consume more space. If you have finished editing the file, you can delete the previous version to make room.

To check the availability of previous versions, right-click the file and select versioning. In the window that appears, you can delete all the revisions that you no longer need. Please note that Google Drive will automatically delete old versions after 30 days or when their number reaches 100. Therefore, there is no reason to specifically deal with this, except for the situation when you need to free up space in the cloud right now.

Keep an eye on the size of the photo

Your fotochki from Google+ also can take place in the cloud storage, but here you need to know the nuances of the following:

• You can upload pictures with a resolution up to 2048 × 2048 pixels. Photos of this size or smaller are not considered in the calculation of the remaining space in general.
• Videos up to 15 minutes can also be stored on Google+ without taking into account in your cloud storage quota.

This means that when downloading photos to Google+ is not necessary to exceed these dimensions, of course, if you want to save space. Make it very simple. Open your Google+ Settings page, scroll down to the section A photo and ensure that it Upload photos at full size It is not checked. In this case, all your uploaded images are automatically compressed and will not consume storage space. The same can be done in the Google+ app for Android, if you upload your photos to the cloud in this way.

You can also view the already stored on Google+ photos and reduce their size to the proposed free storage. Do it now very easy with the help of new editing tools.