At some point in time your hard drive might be nearly full. Even though you might not even have downloaded large files in the past. Updates on applications and games can easily fill up your storage space. What can you do to clear up some hard drive space before upgrading to a larger drive?

Check your recycle bin

Often you need to check if your recycle bin hasn’t been collected a lot of files without really deleting them from your hard drive. Click on empty recycle bin to permanently deleted from your drive. In future you can also use SHIFT + DELETE to make sure a file is permanently deleted and not going to your bin.

Check and delete temporary and downloaded files

There might be files on your pc you are not using or even need them anymore. Therefore you can go to Settings > system then click on Storage (left panel). In older versions you will then click on Temporary files and you can check the boxes of the type of temporary files you want to remove. In newer visions there is a feature called Storage Sense which can automatically free up space by getting rid of files you don’t need.

Large file in games

Nowadays games are becoming so large that’ll need at least 1000GB drive for just a few known pc games. Especially the online games like Apex Legend or Call of Duty Warzone are accumulating large files by each iterative update. There is not much you can do but delete them when you are not playing those games. Most games have a handy feature where you easily move the installation directory to a different location. Buy a 2nd hard drive and move the games to a new folder on this drive free space on your primary hard drive.

Move files, video’s and pictures to an external hard drive

Use a free program like WinDirStat to check in which folder you are using the most storage space. It might happen it is a folder you didn’t know it exists or forgot. Then you can move this folder to an external hard drive. If you have lots of small files in one folder, like photo’s or a back up from a website. Or you like to sync your files now and then. You can check the application FreeFileSync. It syncs the files from each location. Even if the copying failed you can start again from the same point where it failed instead of having to do it again. It also automatically checks with files are already synced.

Disable hibernation to save space

If you use hibernate, the computer will accumulate all snapshots of your files which in the long term takes a lot of space on your drive. You can find this in the file hyberfil.sys.
Disabled it by using Command Prompt, Windows key > type cmd and enter (you might need to run it as a administrator). Enter powercfg /hibernate off and enter it will disable hibernate.

Uninstall programs

If there are programs or games you are not using or playing, you can easily deleted with programs & features in control panel. Even Windows sometimes comes with pre-installed software you might never use.