Clean Google Storage

Finding Free Storage

If finding free storage sounds good to you, you will want to review how we recently helped with an issue someone experienced on their Gmail account.  This person could no longer receive e-mails and Google gave an error indicating that their storage was full.  This end user had deleted most of their e-mails and was confused as to why the problem was still occurring.

Maximize your Google storage for free.

Friendly Tip: If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you have unlimited Photo storage included in your plan. You can download the photos off Google Photos and then upload them to Amazon Photos without worrying you will run out of space.

If you download the Amazon Photos app on your phone, you can set it to automatically backup your photos.

The Full Scoop

So many apps, so little free storage space…

Google gives its users 15 GB of free storage. This data is shared between three Google services: Drive, Gmail, and Photos. If you are experiencing a storage issue with your Google account, here is how you can verify and resolve the issue:

  • Click on your profile’s avatar followed by “Manage Your Google Account”
  • Under “Account Storage” click “Manage Storage”
  • Here you will be able to see which Google service is taking up the most space. It will most likely be your Google Drive or Photos as e-mails do not take up much space.
  • Click the blue box next to the service using the most storage() and it will take you to the page for that service.
  • At this point, you will need to delete any photos or documents you no longer need. If you want to keep all these items, you will need to download them to your local machine.

Once you have deleted all the items you are willing to delete, you need to empty the Trash bin for that service in order to free up the space.

  • Click “Trash” on the side navigation bar and then the “Empty Trash” button
  • Wait about five minutes and you should see the percentage of used storage has lowered and you should begin receiving e-mails again.

As I discovered with the person I was working with, their Google Photos account was using about 10 GB of storage.  Their phone had automatically backed up their photos to Google Photos and they were unaware.  As soon as I emptied their Google Photos and waited a few minutes, the e-mails began flooding in… fixed!