The Best Ways To Free Up Space On Your Hard Drive

You might be blessed to have the latest model of the computer with a hard drive that has ample space to store as much data as possible. But, at the same time, you are also living in the tome where the data has no limits and the contents in your library can become too tough to manage. If your computer shows you “hard drive full” error a lot, you need to free up space on your hard disk. If you do not want to hurt your hard drive and enjoy free space, here are a few tricks to free up space on your hard drive:

Run Disk Cleanup:

If you are a Windows user, there is an option built-in in your operating system that allows you to delete unimportant data as well as temporary files. You can access it by a right-click on your hard drive and select Properties. You can also search for ‘Disk Space Cleanup’ on the start menu. Next, you will see a popup window with details of the space in your disk. Click on Disk Cleanup and then OK and soon the temporary files, log files, files in your recycle bin, and other unimportant files will be erased off your disk.

You can also delete the system restore data by clicking on the more button and choosing Clean up button under System Restore and Shadow Copies.

Uninstall Bulky Applications:

Uninstalling programs that occupy a lot of space in your system is one way to free up space. Go to the Start Menu, Control Panel and then select the Size column. This will give you a clear picture of the space and size of each program. You can also search Uninstall Programs in the Start Menu to reach this window. Check out which program is not useful to you anymore and delete/ uninstall it from the system.

Analyze The Disk Space:

There are several hard drive analysis programs available over the internet. You can always use one of them to analyze the space in your hard drive.  The application will scan the hard drive and offer you a detailed analysis of the space occupied by different programs. You can check which an unimportant file is and delete it anytime. However, before you delete, you must check that it is not a system file and only a personal file occupying a large amount of space in your computer.

Temporary Files Cleanup:

While using Windows Disk Cleanup tool is very efficient, there are chances that it may miss out some large-sized temporary files from the system. For instance, most of the times, Disk Space Cleanup fails to delete firefox or Chrome browser caches. These caches occupy gigabytes of space on your disk. You can always use a more powerful third party app/ program to clean the system better. These applications are powerful and made specially to clean temporary and junk files from the computer.

Locate Duplicate Files:

Just like temporary file clean up applications, there are applications that help you locate duplicate files. These files are not important and are just occupying space on your computer. Made mistakenly or intentionally, these duplicate files can eat a lot of your used hard drive space. The best way to get rid of these files is to download a duplicate file detector program. The program will detect the duplicate files and offer you a log to choose the files you want to delete and get rid of it.

Minimize System Restore Data Space:

Many time, system restore takes a lot of space in your hard disk. Thankfully, you can always work on reducing the space taken by the system restore files. Moreover, by limiting the system restore files, you will have single point storage and not several copies of the same file.

Miscellaneous:

Although these options allow you to free up disk space on your hard drive, the advantage of these options is feasible only if you disable certain features of Windows. Hence, these options are helpful only if you are in dire need of space. Your options are:

Disable Hibernation:

Every time you put your system on hibernation, the data is stored in the RAM in the hard drive. This is done to offer you the same user-interface the next time you sign in to your system.

Disable System Restore:

Disabling the System Restore is one of the suggested ways to free up disk space.

So, these are some great ways that you can use to free up space on your hard drive. Hope you find them useful and will try them out to make ample free space for more content.