For many, Google’s storage is something of a modern-day hard drive. It is the place on the Internet, accessible via mobile phone, tablet and PC, where documents, photos or videos are stored to be kept.
Big G, every time you create a Google account, initially provides 15 GB of free storage space to be divided between Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. If desired, however, it is possible to increase this portion of memory up to 30 TB. All you need to do is sign up for a subscription to Google One , a service recently offered also in Italy that allows you to archive your data online, on the cloud, for a fee. However, spending more may not be necessary. Careful and regular maintenance frees up space by deleting files that are no longer used and superfluous. Here’s how to do it.
Google Drive
To access Google Drive, which has a simple and easy to navigate graphical interface, you must log in with your Google account. You can also check how much memory space is occupied by each user by checking the data on a special page .
Google Drive is a platform launched in 2012 that allows you to create text files and spreadsheets (or upload folders and documents) and save them online along with photos or videos and share them with other users. Of course, every time it is used it takes up memory space. However, it is possible to manage from the main page by checking the accumulated material and deleting what is no longer needed. By opening the following link it is possible to have an overview of the files inserted in Google Drive, starting with the heaviest ones, which take up more space.
To remove them, you need to click on them with the mouse and move them to the trash can, by activating the appropriate icon in the upper right corner which is also activated by clicking the right mouse button. Additionally, you can delete the hidden data of apps linked to Google Drive by going to Settings, clicking the gear button, and selecting Manage applications. From here, it is sufficient to check under the Options item of each individual app for the presence of hidden data to eventually delete them. Finally, don’t forget to empty the trash, at the bottom left section of the main Google Drive page, to permanently delete the junk files.
Google Photos
By switching to Google Photos, which has become an independent app that is no longer automatically synchronized with Google Drive, although the synchronization can be restored using Backup and Sync , images and videos present affect the count of the storage space available to the user. The contents inserted are obviously erasable from PC and mobile devices, once selected and moved to the trash. But you can also free up a significant amount of space by simply converting files from original resolution to high quality. To obtain this result, simply call the Settings item from the applicationfrom the Main Menu at the top left. Once in this section, you can click on “High quality”, changing the upload size from the “Original” position (for content saved in high quality, free storage space is unlimited), to compress existing photos and videos by recovering a significant amount of memory space.
Gmail
As for Gmail, however, the free e-mail service offered by Google also involves an increase in storage space mainly due to the attachments attached to the emails received. The more mail you receive, the more space is available. By accessing Gmail it is possible to identify the largest files from the search box by typing “size: XXmb” (replace XX with the number relating to the minimum size of the files to be traced). In this way, you can delete emails that are no longer useful to the user by right clicking on the trash icon, and then emptying the trash can.
To free up more space, you can go to the spam folder, selectable from the menu on the left, and click “delete all spam messages now”. At this point, the single user with a few tricks will have significantly lightened the memory of his Google account.
