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Windows Secrets > Storage > Best Practices for Freeing Up Space on Your Hard Drive

Best Practices for Freeing Up Space on Your Hard Drive

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Lance Whitney
By Lance Whitney on September 25, 2018 in Storage, Windows Secrets

Here are several ways to dig up more space from a hard drive running on empty.

You keep running low on hard disk space. You may have already taken actions to try to free up storage, such as clearing out your Recycle Bin or uninstalling applications you no longer need. But there are other steps you can take to create more space, especially in Windows 10.

Here are the steps we’ll go through:

  • You can see how much space each category of data is using and remove certain content.
  • If your PC has more than one disk drive, you can move your profile and other folders from your main drive to your secondary drive.
  • You can change where new documents, apps, and other content are saved by default.
  • You can turn on Storage Sense to continually free up space.
  • And if you use OneDrive, you can use the Files On-Demand feature to move folders and files from your computer to your online storage site.

Before you go through the effort of freeing up space, what are your options? Well, disk space is cheap. You can always add a second hard drive to your computer, or move certain files to an external drive or network drive. But files have a way of growing in number to fill up whatever space you have.

Even with a second drive, you may find yourself low on capacity, especially on your primary drive. For example, my desktop computer has a 256GB SSD as its primary drive and a 2TB conventional drive as its secondary. Clearing space on the SSD is the challenge.

First: See How Much Space Everything’s Using



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All Windows Secrets articles posted on 2018-09-25:

  • Ask @WinObs Brace Yourself — These Features Are Leaving Windows 10
  • Storage Best Practices for Freeing Up Space on Your Hard Drive
  •  Show all articles on a single page
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