How to find your storage status
Oh, it looks like I've used 81% of my available storage. And if you're a Google user,
you may have received a warning such as this one as well. So if you want to learn some simple techniques to clean up your storage in Google Drive and Gmail so you don't have to start paying a monthly subscription, this video is for you. Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And first things first, how do you know what your storage level is at? Well, within Gmail, all you need to do is scroll to the very bottom of your screen and you should see a status bar, something like this. And if you click on this link or click on this icon, it will open up a new tab telling you how much storage you've used. Now, I'm going to be using a demo account for today. So, I'm pretty bare at this point in time,
but chances are you have a much fuller storage condition as we speak, made up of both Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. So let's see what we can do to quickly
and easily remove old or unused files so that we can take advantage of our existing storage space.
How to backup files before deleting
But before we start deleting files permanently, let's make sure that we do a backup.
From within your Gmail Drive or other Google app account, I want you to click on your profile account and select manage your Google account. And then on the left hand side, we want to go over to data and privacy. Now, on this screen, you may have to scroll down, almost halfway down to the page, but we want to get to an area called data from apps and services you use. And on the right hand side, we have a box that says, download your data. We're going to make that selection here. And we're taken to a screen called Google Takeout, allowing us to export anything we want across all of our Google services. Now, at the top here, it says select the data to include. And right now I've got 44 out of 45 selected. I'm actually going to select deselect so I can go down and pick just the things that I want to. In this case, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to select my Drive account. And then I'm also going to come down
and you may have to do a little bit of scrolling and select my Gmail account.
Now, of course, you can do this for other Gmail apps and services as well, but for this example, we're just looking at those two. Then I'm going to select next step and I can choose the frequency and or the destination. Now, in this case, I'm just going to do one export here. I'm not going to set up a schedule and I'm fine with it being a zip file here. So here I'm going to select create export. And now it tells me that my export is in progress, letting me know that it can take possibly hours or even days to complete.
Of course, that's going to varydepending on the number of files. But you will receive an email when your export is done. So now that we've safely backed up our data,
Find the largest files in Google Drive
let's get started within Google Drive and see how we can save up some space.
Here from within your Drive screen, you will also see this storage indicator here
on the left hand side. We're going to click on that so that it can show us all of our largest files from greatest to least. So here we can see I've got a video, which in most cases are also going to be some of your largest files. Video files take up an awful lot of space. And in this case, that is the largest thing on my drive. But it will show everything in descending order. So I can go through things one at a time, determine if I have any duplicates, for example, or maybe just things I don't need anymore.
So what I can do is right click on anything here and simply say, remove, which will remove it from this list. Now, the one thing that you're going to want to know as we're going through this process is that when you say remove or delete, it's automatically going to send it to the trash, which means it's still going to be counted towards your storage. So, if you start removing things from the screen that we were just on and saying, you know what, this number is still not going down, you're going to need to come to the trash. And in Gmail, we'll look at how we'll go to the bin and make sure that we empty that trash so that these numbers, these file sizes, no longer count towards your storage. So of course, looking at your storage from greatest to least
Find the oldest files in Google Drive
is going to be one of the fastest ways to remove size and remove files that are incredibly large here within your Drive account. But what if you've already removed a few things and you're still a little heavy? Well, another great way is to do a particular search for some of your oldest files. One way of finding older files and folders is to go to your my Drive screen and then come over here to the last modified column header. And here you can reverse the order. So you can see what is oldest all the way to what is newest. However, this is not the most effective way, since this is only going to sort your files and folders at that top level. So for example, all of the files or sub folders with any of these folders will not be represented here within this sort. So for that, what I recommend, is to come up to the search bar. I recommend you type in the word before, colon, and then the year, month and date that you are wanting to search. So in this case, I want to see everything before 2019, but it's important to include both that month and date. So in this case, you can see everything is coming back that has something, or that was last modified before 2019. And it's actually not a very long list. I can't even scroll all the way down. So I can go through these particular files and see if there's anything here that I would like to delete. If I want to see a longer list, maybe I'm going to change this date to 2020. And now you can see, I have a much longer list,
Find the largest files in Gmail
including other folders that I may want to review. Next, let's jump into our Gmail account and see how we can find things that we no longer need and can get rid of.
Let's get started with the largest size. Now, unlike in Drive, Gmail makes it a little more difficult for us to find those messages. However, we are going to use the filter or search options by selecting this on the right hand side of your search bar.
And about halfway down, we have this size. Greater than or less than. Well, in our case we want to select greater than. And because this is a demo account, I'm going to keep this relatively small. So I'm going to say anything over 100 kilobytes,
but you may want to start with megabytes and work your way down depending on the results that you get. I'm not going to select any other date range in this case,
I'm simply going to select search. And what it will do is come back with all of those emails that are beyond that size limit. Now, when it comes to reviewing your messages by size, keep in mind, it will be displayed in chronological order. So you may want to go through things one at a time just to see what is large. In this case, you may also want to come up to the search bar and start to tweak this number
to see if you can maybe reduce this list along the way. Here, you can see just by increasing this number by a little bit, I've now reduced my listing from 50 plus to just 20. So perhaps, these are the messages that I really want to get rid of and could make a bigger difference to my storage amount.
Find the oldest files in Gmail
Now as our second option, let's also look at some of our oldest emails, which we may no longer need anymore. Just like we did in Drive ,I'm going to come up here and say before and I'm going to enter in the year. But I'm going to be a little more specific.
I'm going to say halfway through the year 2019 and hit enter. And here you can see, we will see all of those messages still listed in chronological order. So you may get a better feel as to what you would like to delete and if there's anything here you would like to keep. If you are satisfied that there's a particular date in the past which you can safely remove all of those messages and keep in mind, we just made that backup a few minutes ago,
Deleting files permanently in Gmail
you can go ahead and delete these emails. Now, pay special attention to this select all check box. If I select it, what it is doing initially, is selecting all 50 conversations on this page. Depending on how many conversations you display per page here in Gmail, it will select all of those conversations. However, if you want to select all conversations that match this particular search, meaning all of the emails before this date, you need to select this link. Now we have everything selected, even beyond the page that we are just viewing. You can now proceed with selecting the delete icon
and removing those messages. And remember, even though you've moved all of those items to the trash, they are still going to currently count against your storage limit. You will need to come into the trash folder, come in here and then decide to empty the trash now. Only at that stage will those messages be permanently removed and therefore, no longer count against your storage limit. Now, if you've made it this far into the video, I'd love for you to prove it by including the words
low storage in the comments down below. And while you're there, why not ask me a question or tell me how you go about saving storage within Google. And if you like these tips and tricks, you'll love the other content right here on the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
