How to Free Up Hard Disk Space

All humans-on some level-are sentimental and it shows in your computers. People save print screens of your first high scores, random but memorable pictures, movies you swear you'd watch again but never really get around to doing it. Well heads up because in case you haven't noticed, our disk space can only handle so much. But worry not because you don't really need to buy an external hard drive-although it might be a good idea-in order to save those memories. Here are a few tricks you could try in order to free some of that precious disk space.

Use Disk Cleanup Utility

This utility is preinstalled in all Windows computers. As the name says, its job is to clean up your hard disks. To access this, just go to My Computer and right click on the disk that you want to clean up. Pick "Properties" from the dropdown list and in the General tab, you can see a button that says "Disk Cleanup". Click on that and it will automatically run the utility. Another way to do this is by clicking on the Start button and showing All Programs. Open Accessories folder and Look for the System Tools folder. Under that folder, you will find the Disk Cleanup Utility and when you click on that, it will ask you which hard drive to clean. Just select on your desired drive and go through the process.

Uninstall unused apps

Applications installed on your computer comprise a big part of the hard disk space. But not all of them are always used so why not remove those unused apps in order to free some disk space? To do that, just click on the Start button and select Control Panel. Then look for the Programs folder and select Uninstall Programs. This will call up a list of all existing programs in your computer and on the next column, you will see the amount of space it takes up. Uninstall those unused apps, especially the ones that take up large spaces. But be careful in doing this because you might uninstall certain software components that are needed by your laptop to in order to run properly. When in doubt, search on the internet. There are a lot of sites that offer the function of unfamiliar programs.

Delete temporary files

There are a lot of temporary files that are saved in your computer without you knowing. Although Disk Cleanup Utility deletes temporary files, it is not capable of deleting temporary files from made by other programs like internet caches which take up a lot of disk space. So how can you remove such files? The answer is to install a program that has a function of removing temporary files from third-party apps. You can get some of these for free on the internet. Just download the installer, and run it on your computer.

Remove shadow copies and system restore

Other files that take up a lot of space without you knowing are the system restore files. Such files are used in cases of system failure and you'd have to restore the system to its factory settings. This is really important and would have been okay if it doesn't allocate 15% of your space to a Shadow Copy, or Volume Snapshot Device. In fact, you don't really need that much of Shadow Copy.

To delete it, just click on the Start button and search for command prompt. Right click on the program that appears and select "Run as Administrator". First type in the "command vssadmin list shadowstorage". This will call up a list of important information about Shadow Copies such as where it is stored, the used space, the allocated space, and the maximum "Shadow Copy" storage space.

Then in the command prompt, type in the command "vssadmin delete shadows /for= [/oldest | /all | /shadow=] [/quiet]." In this command, the "/for=" specifies the volume where the Shadow Copy would be deleted. It can be seen on the list mentioned above. The command /oldest deletes only the oldest Shadow Copy which is not that important when restoring your system for you can just use the more recent ones. The command /all deletes all Shadow Copies present in the selected drive. The command "/shadow=" deletes a certain shadow copy specified by a Shadow ID. So when typing the command for deleting a copy, just select one among the aforementioned three commands. Lastly, the command /quiet tells the system not to display messages while it is running.

Make sure there aren't multiple copies of a single file

This is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of people unknowingly have multiple copies of a certain files like songs, pictures, etc. Although this might not have large memories, disk space is still wasted when you have multiple copies so just permanently delete the other copies by highlighting the files and then pressing "Ctrl-Shift-Del".