Keep in mind that the Google Drive space is the same that you are going to use for Gmail or Google Photos. Therefore, preventing it from running out will also help you avoid problems when receiving an email, for example. It is important that you always have some space available that you may need.
Save space in Drive
Although Google Drive offers a lot of space in its paid plans, it is in the free version where we can have problems. In fact, they offer the same thing as years ago. If you have had an account for a long time, you may have accumulated large files that, perhaps, you do not need today.
Delete large files from Drive
Something essential you can do is eliminate the larger files that you have in Drive. This is key, since they could be consuming a significant part of the total. Maybe at some point you uploaded folders that you no longer need, but you forgot to delete them to prevent them from taking up so much space.
To view large files in Google Drive, you can do so through the Storage section and there you can sort them by size. You will see the files that occupy the most first. You may have files that take up even several GB of data, so you could delete them if you don’t need them.
Be careful with duplicate files
You should also check that you do not have duplicate files. You can go to the previous section and see the largest ones, to check if you have them repeated. You could also go to the folders where you store files and see if you have any duplicates, something that would be consuming space without being necessary.
Sometimes you might have shared a folder with someone and still have a copy on your Drive. This will make you consume twice as much as you should, which you can avoid.
Delete Gmail attachments
But you should not only take into account the files that take up space in Drive, but also the attachments that you may have in Gmail. All of this is going to add up and could be quite a bit if you have a lot of forgotten emails. Over time, you could accumulate too many and that will cause you to have less space available.
What can you do to avoid this? You simply have to go to your Gmail and search for this: has:attachment larger:20M. All emails that have attachments and occupy more than 20 MB will appear. You can change the 20 to 10, for example, to show you those that have files larger than 10 MB. From there, you can delete the ones you don’t need.
Check Google Photos
You can do something similar with Google Photos. Not only do the files you have in Drive or Gmail emails take up space, but also everything you have uploaded to Google Photos. It is something else that you should check to avoid consuming those 15 GB free that Google offers to save content.
Maybe you uploaded photo backups a while ago and no longer need them. You could even download them and save them on a physical drive, if you don’t need to have all that content uploaded to the cloud and always available.
In short, you should keep this in mind to avoid running out of space in Google Drive. Check the largest files carefully, be careful with duplication and also look at the Gmail attachments or whatever you have uploaded to Google Photos.
