Life Hacks to Free Up Space on Your Hard Drive
Hard drive storage technology has greatly evolved; storage volumes of modern devices can often reach one or even more terabytes. This allows you to store a significant amount of information on your PC without worrying about free space. Unfortunately, some software, games, media assets, or other utilities are too large. When stored on a hard drive, these significantly slow down the work of a machine and can even cause damage or even breakage of a personal computer.
Therefore, many users often face the problem of cleaning the media to free up some disk space. In this post, we will share the most effective life hacks on how to optimize data storage on your PC, speed up your computer, and find a place where unnecessary files and temporary data accumulate.
Life Hack #1 – Perform a Disk Cleanup
Just like proper Mac storage management, some basic hard drive maintenance is sometimes enough to gain a few extra megabytes of disk space. All you have to do is to remove unnecessary files from your disk using the Windows built-in tool called Disk Cleanup.
Life Hack #2 – Uninstall Unnecessary Apps & Remove Unnecessary Files
We all probably have some programs on our computers that we don’t use. Such utilities can take up a lot of disk space, and removing them will definitely give you some extra storage space. So just sit with an active software for a couple of minutes and delete the programs that you do not use.
You should do the same for unnecessary files. In Windows 10, storage offers an easy way to remove unnecessary files from the system drive. Using this feature, you can quickly get rid of files after previous installations, free up storage space and improve disk efficiency.
Life Hack #3 – Run Analysis & Disk Defragmentation
To find out what exactly is eating up the space on your hard drive, you can check it using some hard drive analysis programs. Hard drive analyzers scan your hard disk and provide you with a detailed report about every piece of information stored in it. Among other things, it gives you a list of files taking up space on your hard drive.
After scanning your system with a disk analyzer, you will know exactly which folders or files take up the most space. Remove unnecessary files/folders – and free disk space will increase. Be careful not to delete important system or personal files. After completing this task, it is highly recommended that you defragment your hard drive.
Life Hack #4 – Remove Temporary Files & Duplicate Assets
The disk cleanup approach above is very useful, but it does not remove temporary files from third-party software like web browser cache. It is a good way to improve the system condition and speed up the work of your PC. Duplicate files can also take up space on your hard drive. Fortunately, there are several programs that can find and remove all duplicate files and free up space for you.
Life Hack #5 – Disable Hibernation and System Restore
These tricks will definitely save you space, but they will disable some important Windows features. Therefore, we do not recommend performing these operations on your own. You should only use it if you desperately need more space. This is how it works:
- Disable hibernation. When the computer goes into hibernation, it saves the contents of RAM to the hard drive. This allows your computer to maintain a system state without using power, which can lead you back to where you are the next time you boot your PC;
- Disable system restore. You can also turn off the system restore completely to save disk space. But it will delete all restore points and your backup data. So if something goes wrong with your computer, you won’t be able to use System Restore to get it back to the normal mode.
Life Hack #6 – Empty the Recycle Bin
When you delete most files, they are not immediately removed from the hard drive. Instead, they are moved to the recycle bin so that you could restore them if needed. However, over time, the bin can grow in size, taking up a lot of space. This means that cleaning up files that are no longer needed should be one of the first things you should do to get some of your storage back.
Life Hack #7 – Move Files to an External Drive
If you are still running low on hard drive capacity, then you must configure your external drive to move and store some files. On top of that, you can even configure Windows 10 to automatically save files to a new location for future data. For this purpose, you can use cloud services and sync your cloud account with any device. As an alternative solution, you can also save heavy multimedia files to external platforms of no watermark free video converters. Thus, there will be no need for you to have them locally on your PC.
Final Say!
Is there a lot of unnecessary data on your hard drive taking up free space? Now, you know that this problem is easy to solve. The methods above will allow you to free up a significant amount of disk space and get rid of unnecessary files that simply accumulate and are useless on the media.
