How to free up hard drive space in windows 10

We bring you the definitive tutorial on how to free up hard drive space in Windows 10.

While storage devices are getting bigger, and the price per gigabyte continues to drop, we also have more photos and videos that we take with our mobile devices, in addition to the many files that we can download from the internet.

How to free up hard drive space in Windows 10 step by step

This problem is even greater if you have a computer with limited storage space or a solid state drive (SSD), since they still do not offer a large capacity compared to that of traditional hard drives.

If you've already started noticing the rapid shrinkage of space on your computer's hard drive, your first strategy shouldn't be to buy a new drive to expand storage. Instead, you should scan and delete those files that are wasting valuable space.

In this guide to free up space in Windows 10 we will show 8 tips to recover space on your computer's hard drive.

Disk Cleanup

First, start typing Disk Cleanup in Cortana's search box in the lower left corner of the screen, next to the Start button. As soon as you start typing in the search box, Cortana will start suggesting applications and files that are related to what you've entered. Click on Disk Cleanup at the top of the list.

This will open the Disk Cleanup for drive C:, where you can erase temporary files, recycle bin, old logs and caches, and also previous installations of Windows. Choose the drive and click OK to immediately start freeing up disk space and see if this meets your needs, or continue to the next step below to remove previous installations of Windows.

If you need to free up as much space as possible, and don't mind deleting older versions of Windows, then scroll through the list of files you want to delete and select all temporary files and older versions of Windows. But note that after removing previous versions of Windows, you will not be able to roll back Windows 10 to an earlier version with just a few clicks. Without the previous version of Windows installed on your machine, the restore option is removed and an older version of Windows would have to be reinstalled from a disk or from other backup methods.

Change the way you use OneDrive

OneDrive is a cloud service for Windows, so you might think that putting all your data in the cloud could help free up space on your hard drive. This is true, except for a particular OneDrive feature, with which it has the ability to save files offline on your hard drive, which you may not even know.

Sometimes this is useful. If you are dealing with confidential files or large projects, it is a good idea to have a backup. But if you are using OneDrive to automatically save every offline document and file, then you are probably wasting space on your hard drive.

The OneDrive icon is on the right side of the Task Bar . Click on the cloud icon and select Settings , then select the Choose Folders tab. This will take you to all the file types that OneDrive has hosted and the amount of space each one consumes. Deselect all the OneDrive folders that are not absolutely necessary.

Remember: you are going to continue to have access to all of these files online at OneDrive.com, so you won't really lose any files.

You can use Xbox One to free up space

Microsoft platforms are increasingly interconnected, and convergence is very evident in Windows 10, which connects more freely to other Microsoft devices like Xbox One. If you have an Xbox One, you can use it to help save some space selecting applications and data.

An Xbox One can have 500 GB of content, including a variety of networks and music applications. You can stream content from Xbox to Windows 10 in a few steps. This allows you to store data on the game console and free up space on your PC, if you have content that you only use at home. Just remember to delete the data from your PC after transfer to the Xbox.

Using an external drive to free up space

From USB drives to external hard drives, one of the easiest ways to clean up your hard drive in Windows 10 is by moving additional data outside of your computer.

First, plug in a USB or hard drive and make sure it's properly formatted and ready for loading. Drag and drop a file onto the new disk and then delete the original file from your PC.

However, you can also move large amounts of files at once. Open File Explorer and select all the files you want to move off your hard drive. Once selected, go to the Move to option, and select the location.

Delete unnecessary files

Often, we have a tendency to save a lot of files, even if we will never need them. On the other hand, we have to store these files in nested folders, and we can never really understand the space they end up wasting on the hard drive. Partly because Windows doesn't provide the folder size data in File Explorer by default.

However, in Windows 10, you can use the Storage setting to get an overview of how the space is being used on the unit's main system and external hard drives. But more importantly, you can now see the folders that are using the most space, which can help identify and make a decision on which files can be deleted to free up some storage space.

Windows temporary files are used to manage document editing, some application processes, various printing tasks, and so on. These files are normally automatically deleted, but sometimes some remain. You can get rid of all of them to gain space.

How to find and delete temporary files:

- Use Windows key + I to open the Settings application.

- Click on System > Storage .

- Select the unit you want to analyze. (Note that This computer is the primary hard drive where Windows 10 is installed.)

- In Storage Use , you can see that Windows 10 categorizes the content based on the default folders, such as Documents, Images, Music, Applications, Games and System Files. Here you can see how much each folder occupies. Simply click on the item name for more information.

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- If you want to delete its content, click on the View button to open the folder location and delete the files you don't need.

- Go back to Storage Use and click on Temporary Files . In this section, Windows 10 will give you a list of different types of temporary files that you may want to delete, including the temporary Downloads files and the Recycle Bin . Click the button for the content you want to remove and follow the instructions to delete the files.

- Go back to Storage Use and click on Others . Windows 10 uses this section for a list of all folders that could not be classified. Identify the folders that are using the most storage space and click on them to access the location.

- Select the files and by clicking with the right mouse button choose Delete to delete the folders and files.

Delete versions of File History

If you are running out of space on your hard drive, you may have configured File History to keep your personal files constantly saved as a backup.

However, chances are you've just set up the basic settings, which by default make copies of your files every hour and keep them forever. This installation setup can quickly utilize a large amount of storage by reducing the available space you could use for storage.

Here's how to change the File History settings and how to use the cleanup tool to remove the old version of files and folders:

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- Use the Windows key + X to open the User Menu and select Control Panel.

- Click on File History .

- In the left panel, click on Advanced Settings .

- In Versions , change the default options by clicking on the drop-down menu on the right for "Save file copies" and "Keep saved versions" of the options that best suit your needs. For example, every 12 hours and 3 months, respectively.

- Then click on Clean versions .

- In this tool select the versions of the files you want to delete from the drop-down menu. For example, select the All but the last option, if you want more space but only keep one version of the files.

- Click on the Clean button to complete the process.

- Click the Save changes button in the Advanced settings.

With the new configuration, you will recover a good amount of available space, and future backups of the File History will consume less space by reducing the frequency with which each file is saved.

Uninstall apps you don't need

In the past, you only needed to open Programs and Features in Control Panel to get rid of applications. However, in Windows 10, Settings can now be used to uninstall traditional desktop programs as well as new applications from the Windows 10 Store.

- Use Windows key + I to open the Settings application.

- Click on System .

- Enter Applications and Features .

- Identify the applications that you do not need and that are using more space on your computer. Select an application and click the Uninstall button.

- Confirm by clicking the second Uninstall button.

- If you are trying to uninstall an application from the Windows 10 Store, no further action is required. If it is a desktop application, you will have to follow the on-screen instructions to complete the uninstallation.

- Repeat the steps to remove any other application.

Delete duplicate photos

Duplicate photos are a waste of space on your PC's hard drive, external storage, and even OneDrive, now that users can no longer enjoy unlimited storage space. If you often take multiple photos of the same thing, you can use third-party tools such as Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder to find and remove duplicate images.

Please note that the tool we are mentioning today is a free third-party software service, and you must download and use it at your own risk.

- Visit the Duplicate Photo Finder page and click on the download link for the portable version.

- Right click on the zip folder and select Extract all .

- Click on the Extract button.

- The tool is portable, which means that installation is not necessary. Just double click on the AwesomePhotoFinder.exe file to run the tool.

- On the main screen of Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder click on the “+” sign to add a folder location where you want to search for duplicate images.

- Click on the Start Search button to start the exploration.

- Once the exploration is finished, you will be presented with all the duplicated photos and the similarity score between them. Click the Delete button on the images that you do not want to keep.

- Click Yes to confirm the deletion.

Repeat the same process until no more photos appear in the app. The scanned folder should now contain a version of a particular photo. If you change your mind, you can restore the images from the Recycle Bin .

These 8 methods will free up a significant amount of space on your hard drive, certainly enough space to install more applications and save more files. You will be amazed at the large amount of space you can recover to enjoy good storage on your hard drive again.

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