How to Free Up Space on Your Laptop

A cluttered hard drive is a cluttered mind. (I think Albert Einstein said that.) If you're constantly fighting against a "Low disk space" warning, it may be time for a little spring cleaning. Here's how to find out what's taking up space on your PC or Mac—and what to do with the files you just can't let go of.

Before you start deleting things willy-nilly, you should step back and look for the big wins. Deleting a bunch of 50-MB files here and there isn't going to make nearly as big a difference as cleaning out an 80-GB folder of old TV shows or uninstalling a few games. (Seriously, if you're a gamer, clearing out old titles can free up huge chunks of space instantly—be honest about what you're actually going to play. You can always reinstall later.)

If you're on a Windows 10 machine, open up Settings > System > Storage to see a breakdown of your drive and which folders are taking up the most space. You can click on any category to see more information, especially in the "Other" category, which will show you individual folders with large files in them. Find stuff you don't need anymore, and get rid of it—it's not always easy, but this is the best thing you can do to free up space.

If you're on a Mac, you can analyze your drive for large files by clicking the Apple menu in the top-left corner and going to About This Mac > Storage. Click the Manage button and you'll see different categories in the sidebar that you can select for a list of large files. Right-click files to delete them, and empty the Trash when you're finished.

If you find these tools a little too basic, third-party alternatives like WinDirStat and Disk Inventory X can dig even further to find out exactly what folders and files are using your storage space. You might find old iPhone backups you no longer need, videos you might have stored in the wrong folder, or disk images from that old Raspberry Pi project. For most people, the built-in disk analyzer will be fine, but these third-party tools can be helpful if you have large files hidden in more unconventional folders.

You've probably heard this advice before: Both Windows and macOS store temporary files like thumbnails, old update packages, or cached internet files that you can delete to free up space. And that's true, but I'm going to be a bit of a buzz-kill here: These files will eventually come back, as that's how the system is designed to work—these caches help your computer run faster. So while this might eke out a bit of extra space for the time being, it's not a permanent solution, and it probably won't free up nearly as much space as cleaning out your own vault of personal files.

In Windows 10, click the Start menu and search for Disk Cleanup. You'll be given a list of files you can delete, at which point you can just click OK to free up that space instantly—or click "Clean Up System Files" for a few more options.

A new feature called Storage Sense can do some of this automatically. Head back to Settings > System > Storage, and at the top, click the Configure Storage Sense link. This will give you some options like deleting temporary files older than a certain age, or moving rarely used files to OneDrive (more on that in a moment). Flip the switch at the top to On when you're done, and choose how often you want Storage Sense to run. Personally, I like to keep this off and manage things myself, but to each their own.

Macs don't have a similar tool for cleaning up temporary files, but both Windows and Mac users can run free programs like CCleaner to perform those tasks. Again, most of this stuff will come back anyway, and if you go too hog-wild with programs like these, you might cause as many problems as you solve (I recommend staying away from the Registry cleaner). But it might be able to point you to large files you'd have otherwise missed—it also has a Duplicate Finder built in that might be able to find large files you have stored twice (like a movie you accidentally copied to two locations). Again, focus on the large files rather than trying to delete a bunch of smaller files. You won't free up much space with the latter, and the more things you delete, the more you risk deleting something actually important.

Finally, be wary of deleting system files like Windows' hiberfil.sys, which stores the contents of your system during hibernation, or System Restore files, which allow you to roll back your system if problems arise. Both of these features can be turned off to save space, but they're useful enough that I wouldn't really recommend it, especially for less advanced users.

If you find files you aren't ready to get rid of yet, you might be able to move them somewhere else for safe keeping. For example, I have gigabytes of work and tax documents that I rarely need to access but want to keep for a few years, and my wife has some projects from her grad school days she wants access to if she needs them. You don't need to waste precious storage on your laptop keeping these kinds of things around—put them on an external drive or upload them to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or OneDrive. Windows can automatically move unused files to OneDrive using the aforementioned Storage Sense feature, but again, I prefer to have manual control. Just remember that if you use a service like Dropbox, it may sync those files to your computer automatically, so you'll have to go into the program's settings and unselect those files so they're stored in the cloud only.

If you choose the external drive option, just remember that you should also back up those files to the cloud if they're truly important to you—external drives can and will fail just like regular hard drives, and if that's your only copy of the data, you still need it backed up somewhere.

Ultimately, most of these solutions are temporary. Temporary files will return, your cloud storage will fill up, and you'll keep collecting music, movies, and other files. You can repeat this process every few months, but eventually, it's going to become tiresome—or you're going to run out of stuff you're willing to delete.

So once you start encountering that “Disk full” warning, know that you'll probably want a bigger drive in the somewhat near future. If your laptop's storage is upgradeable, you can easily buy a bigger drive online—either a 2.5-inch SSD or an M.2 drive, whichever your laptop supports. You may need to look up what kind of M.2 drive your laptop requires, but once you do, you can swap it in yourself with a small screwdriver kit. If your laptop storage isn't upgradeable, you'll need to make sure your next laptop upgrade includes all the storage you think you'll need down the line. It'll cost more up front, but you'll save money in the long run. Oh, and in the meantime, you can grab an SD card or low-profile flash drive and just leave it plugged into your laptop for extra onboard storage—some are so small that you'll hardly notice they're there.

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