Cleaning up your Google Drive Storage |
You may experience a cap on the storage capacity of your GCA Google account. If you see the following message, you should take immediate steps to free up storage. You do not have to wait to see this message to be prepared.
What happens when your Google Drive runs out of space? You cannot create new files of any kind, nor update existing ones. You cannot upload photos, videos, or homework files from your computer or Chromebook to your Google Drive. It is good practice to keep your storage well under 50 GB to prevent this.
Follow the tips below to clean up your Google Drive so you will have enough room for your important work and saved files.
- Start by looking at the storage you have used in Google Drive. (See steps below)
- You will be able to see storage listed from largest to smallest.
- Take some time to look at what you have and determine what is important to keep
Tips to decide what to keep in Drive
- Is it not related to school work?
- Is it more than 1-2 years old?
- Will you need this after the school year is over?
- Do you have extra copies taking up space?
- Are there old videos that are no longer needed?
- You may move any file to an external storage device, such as a USB flash drive or external hard drive, if you find something old that you want to keep.
How to Clean Up and Prepare Your Account:
- Access your Google Drive: Choose the Google Drive icon from your Champion Portal page.
- Check Your Current Storage: In Google Drive, click Storage on the left menu to see your total storage used. This automatically sorts your files from largest to smallest so you can quickly spot heavy files—like old video projects or presentations—and delete what you no longer need.
- Select Individual Files to Delete: Click on one file to highlight it. Hold down the CTRL key and click any other files to add to your selection. Choose the trash can icon to delete all the highlighted ones.
- Select a Group of Files to Delete:
- Click on one file to highlight it. Hold down the CTRL key and click the letter A to select the entire group.
- To select a smaller consecutive group of files, after highlighting the first file, scroll down to the last file, hold down the Shift key and click the file.
- Choose the trash can icon to delete all the highlighted ones.
Once you have placed files in the trash, you will need to take one last step and empty your trash. Files in the trash still contribute to your storage limits.
- In your Drive or Gmail, choose the Trash icon. Once you are in the Trash area, look to the upper right side of your screen to click on Empty trash.