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PAGE CONTENT:
- How to See What Is Taking Up Space on Hard Drive in Windows 10/8/7
- How to Free Up Disk Space on Windows 10/8/7 [7 Methods]
Q: Something is eating my hard drive space in Windows 10, help!
'About three weeks ago, my 500GB hard drive suddenly became extremely slow and had only 50GB left. Now the hard drive only has just 100MB left, and I can't even open the drive to use a file quickly. It looks like something is eating my hard drive space, but I don't know what it could be.
How can I find out what's taking up space on my hard drive and resolve this issue? Can anyone help? I'm using Windows 10.'
Your hard drive may get full suddenly without a specific reason. If the hard drive is a system disk and is nearly full, the Windows will be affected and slow down. If you are experiencing disk space is used up, follow along to figure out what's taking up space on your hard drive and then address the problem and free up your disk space.
How to See What Is Taking Up Space on Hard Drive in Windows 10/8/7
There are two steps you can do to find out what is taking up space on your hard drive:
Step 1. Show hidden files on the hard drive
We have provided a complete guide with three methods to display hidden files on the hard drive. You can refer to this page for a guide: How to Show Hidden Files on computer hard drive.
Step 2. Analyze hard drive and find what's eating up hard drive space
Here we'll use Windows 10 as an example to show you how to see what's taking up space on the hard drive. This method can also be applied to Windows 8.1/8/7:
1. Right-click on the Windows icon and select 'Settings'.
2. Click 'System', then click 'Storage' on the left-side panel.
3. In the Storage window, you'll get a view of the space usage situations on all your hard drive partitions as shown in the image below:
4. Then click on a nearly full hard drive partition. You'll be able to see what's taking up the most space on PC, including apps and features taking up storage.
Now that you've known that what apps and features are taking up storage on your PC, you can manually clean up your hard drive by removing temporary files, useless apps, etc.
Click each hard drive partition, figure out what's taking up space. Click each category and remove useless apps, files, etc..
If you don't like to remove files manually, how to thoroughly and automatically free up disk space and make the computer fast? Read on, and you'll learn all the practical methods to free up disk and speed up Windows 10.
7 Effective Ways to Free Up Disk Space on Windows 10/8/7
After checking out what's is taking most space on your hard drive in Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10, you can follow the provided approaches here to free up space for important files, programs, and improve computer's performance.
1. Remove Junk Files/Useless Large Files
If you've found that the hard drive space is taken up by many temporary files or useless large files, EaseUS Tools M is an ideal tool. It's a free and light program to solve many tough problems, including remove write protection on USB, SD, the internal, and external hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.
It also supports cleaning up all hard drive partitions with its System Optimize Tool by cleaning up junk files and large files. Install it on your PC now to quickly clear up space on your hard drive and improve the computer performance.
Step 1. DOWNLOAD and install EaseUS Tools M. Select 'System Cleanup' on the main screen.
Step 2. Select the type of junk files you want to scan and click 'Analyze'.
Step 3. Identify and select useless files and click 'Clean up' to remove those files from your PC or laptop.
You may also choose 'Clean Large Files' to remove useless large files, which is also useful to clears out a lot of free space.
2. Run Disk Cleanup to Clean Temporary Files
Unlike disk defragmentation, which rearranges the files, Disk Cleanup works to remove temporary files and other unimportant data on the hard drive and help to reclaim your disk space.
Step 1. Open This PC, right-click on your system drive and choose 'Properties'.
Step 2. Click 'Disk Cleanup' under the 'General' tab, and the utility will start scanning your drive and calculating how much space you can free.
Step 3. When it is done, choose 'Clean up system files' in the window to let the tool scan your disk again.
Step 4. After the scan completes, click 'OK' in the new window. Then you will see a notification asking you, 'Are you sure you want to permanently delete these files?'. Click Delete Files. Since these operations just remove unnecessary files in your system, you don't need to worry about losing important files.
If disk cleanup is not working in Windows 10, learn how to fix it first here.
3. Uninstall Unused Bloatware Software
Many PCs come with multiple pre-installed programs you don't want or need, which are in large size and cause your computer in low disk space. To free up space on your hard drive and make your Windows 10 run faster, you can uninstall the bloatware.
Right-click the Start menu, choose 'Control Panel' > 'Programs' > click 'Uninstall a program'. Select the programs you no longer need and click 'Uninstall' at the top of the list.
4. Free Up Space by Storing Files on Another Hard Drive or the Cloud
If you have some important large files that are occupying big space on a hard drive, you can try one of the tips below:
Tip 1. Add a new disk to your PC, move and store files to the new disk.
Tip 2. Store files to an external storage device.
Tip 3. Store files to a cloud account, such as OneDrive.
Tip 4. Back up big files into an image with a compressed format, which will save almost a half-space on your disk.
5. Transfer Programs, Apps, and Games to External Hard Drive
If your internal hard drive on Windows is full of installed programs, applications, and games, you can change the install location of these programs. You can free up space on your hard drive by moving programs to an external hard drive and make sure that you can run the program on any other computer. How to do that? Use EaseUS PCTrans to accomplish app migration with a few clicks.
Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to your computer. Open EaseUS Todo PCTrans and select 'App Migration > Start'.
Step 2. Find and choose the applications (marked as 'Yes') that you want to transfer. You can select multiple apps.
Click 'Browse' and select your external hard drive as the destination to store the apps.
Step 3. Then, click 'Transfer' to move your programs to an external hard drive
6. Disable Hibernate
When you hibernate your system, it saves the contents of its RAM to your hard drive. This allows it to save its system state without any power usage – the next time you boot your computer, you'll be back where you left off. Windows saves the contents of your RAM in the C:hiberfil.sys file. To save hard drive space, you can disable Hibernate entirely, which removes the file.
If you are using this feature and it's useful for you, don't turn it off. It's up to you.
Step 1. Click on Start, and open Control Panel then click on 'Power Options'. On the left side, click on 'Change when the computer sleeps'.
Step 2. Now click on Change advanced power settings. In the Advanced Power Options window, expand the 'Sleep'. Then expand 'Hibernate after' and change the minutes to 0 to turn it off.
Step 3. Or you can specify the amount of minutes you want to pass before it goes into hibernation. Click 'Apply' and 'OK' then close out of the remaining screens.
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7. Upgrade to a Larger HDD/SSD
If none of the above options will free up enough free space on your hard drive on Windows 10 or Windows 7, the most thorough solution is to replace the old hard drive with a larger new hard drive. Cloning is the best way to replace a hard disk drive, because cloning can migrate your old disk to the new one exactly, without any data loss, and it's very convenient.
EaseUS Partition Master, an ultimate partition management tool, enables you to clone an entire disk to another even the destination partition is smaller than the source, which means you can clone larger HDD to smaller HDD.
Download this easy-to-use disk management program to clone hard drive to HDD or SSD with simple guides.
Step 1: Select the source disk.
Open EaseUS Partition Master. Right-click the disk that you want to copy or clone. Then, select 'Clone'.
Step 2: Select the target disk.
Choose the wanted HDD/SSD as your destination and click 'Next' to continue.
Step 3: View the disk layout and edit the target disk partition size.
Then click 'Continue' when the program warns it will wipe out all data on the target disk. (If you have valuable data on the target disk, back up it in advance.)
You can select 'Autofit the disk', 'Clone as the source' or 'Edit disk layout' to customize your disk layout. (Select the last one if you want to leave more space for C drive.)
Step 4: Execute the operation.
Click the 'Execute the operation' option and click 'Apply' to start the disk cloning process.
Except for disk cloning, EaseUS Partition Master provides more one-stop disk partition features, such as resize/move partitions to solve low disk space issue, merge partitions, create/delete/format partition, wipe partition data, and disk/partition conversion.
Final Verdict
Now you've learned how to see 'what is taking up space on my hard drive Windows 7/8/710' and how to free up space on the hard drive with seven feasible fixes. However, there is no one-for-all solution. High disk space usage frequently occurs, even if you've upgraded to a larger hard drive. So remember to use these disk space cleanup methods to clear up your disk regularly.
When you check the storage on your Mac, you might see a significant percentage of space occupied by something called ‘Other.’ macOS does not go into much detail. You may wonder what is Other storage on Mac, why it eats up so much space, and how can I delete it? Let me help by telling you more about this to free space on your Mac.
How to Check Storage on Mac
- Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
- Click on Storage. Wait for a few seconds.
- Take the mouse pointer to colored sections. You will see how much space is occupied by different categories like Apps, Photos, System, Trash, Other, etc.
What is Other on Mac Storage?
Just like the ‘Other’ on iPhone and iPad, it is home to several files, cached data, and more. This section houses a mix of junk and important files.
In the simplest of terms, the “Other” category is a combination of files that are not recognized as one of the other file types. Here are some examples:-
- Common documents and file types, including PDF, doc, PSD, etc.
- Any type of archives and disk images, including zips, dmg, iso, tar, etc.
- Files in the system folders of macOS, including temporary files, swap, voices, etc.
- Application Support files, iCloud files, Screensavers, etc.
- Cache items, including browser cache and locally stored message media files.
- Fonts, app accessories, application plugins, and app extensions.
- Various file and file types not recognized by Spotlight, for example, a virtual machine hard drive, Windows Boot Camp partitions, etc.
How to Delete Other on Mac Storage
Delete Cache Files on Mac
In typical situations, you do not need to worry much about cache. macOS handles them smartly. But if you are too low on storage or believe in having the cache of unused/uninstalled apps, here is how to delete them.
Note: Caches are there to make your Mac experience better and faster. Make sure you remove only the unnecessary ones.
- From Finder, click on Go.
- Press the option key. You will see a new option for the Library. Click on it.
- Click on Caches.
- Right-click on unnecessary app/service folders and choose Move to Trash.
- Right-click on the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash.
Note + Tip: With regular use, macOS will recreate these caches. If you do not understand what to delete, go back and copy the entire Caches folder to desktop (for backup). Next, open the Caches folder, press Command + A, right-click, and then Move to Trash. Finally, empty the Trash. See if everything works properly or not. In case not, copy the contents of the backup Caches folder from desktop inside the actual Caches folder.
Clearing browser cache and website files for Safari also reduce the Other storage.
Clear Temporary Files Located in Other Storage on Mac
- From Finder, click on Go.
- Press the option key.
- Click on Library.
- Click on Application Support.
- Delete files from here that you do not need. For example, old app folders that you do not need or have.
Remove Safari Extensions on Mac
At times, we install a browser extension for a purpose, and then do not reuse them or simply forget that it exists. The extension continues to occupy space (shown differently than the application itself. It is thus categorized under Other)
To remove an extension:
- Safari: Open Safari → Click on Safari from top left → Preferences → Extensions → Click on an extension → Choose Uninstall.
- Chrome: Open Chrome → Extensions icon (puzzle icon next to account picture) → Manage Extensions → Remove those you do not use.
Remove Old Downloads
Downloads are usually saved in the Downloads folder (unless you changed them). We often download .dmg files, large packages, videos, zip files, and leave them there. For example, many people do not delete the .dmg file even after app installation. Same for zip files.
- Open Finder and click on Downloads from the left sidebar.
- Click on the word ‘Size’ to arrange the items by size. This will help you locate the large files quickly.
- To delete, right-click on the file and choose Move to Trash. You may also select the files(s) and press Command + Delete.
Tip: Use Spotlight Search to search for big file types like – .dmg, .zip, .mp4, .mkv, .avi, etc. Then click on Show all in Finder… from the lower-left of the Spotlight Search screen. Next, you can delete them easily.
Delete Unnecessary iPhone and iPad Backups
iOS and iPadOS device backups might run into various gigabytes. If you have several archived backups or unnecessary backups of old devices, make sure to delete them.
- Click on the Apple logo and choose About This Mac.
- Click on Storage → Manage.
- Select iOS Files from the sidebar.
- Click on the files and choose Delete.
Note: If you accidentally delete a backup, go ahead and easily create a new one now.
Delete Unused Applications
Applications, when combined with their data, folders, etc. might be vast and occupy significant space. If you have several apps that are sitting idle, go ahead and delete them. Additionally, remove macOS install files, if any.
- Click on the Apple logo from the top-left and choose About This Mac.
- Click on Storage. Next, click on Manage.
- Select Applications from the sidebar.
- Click on an unnecessary one and then click on Delete.
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Note: You may also use apps like App Cleaner for perfect uninstallation.
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Use Third-Party Software to Free Storage on Your Mac
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Apart from the inbuilt solutions, several third-party apps do almost the same thing but in an easier way. You launch them, and in a minute or so, they will help you free significant space. The interface for most is visually pleasing. If you have difficulty following the above methods, you may try one of the apps listed below.
- DaisyDisk ($9.99)
- Onyx (free)
- CleanMyMac (free download with paid version $39.95)
Signing Off…
These are some of the effective ways to delete Other storage on Mac. As stated earlier, it has lots of useful files, too (that are different from listed categories). Thus it is tough to remove Otherdata entirely. But the above ways, help you declutter it. Next, it would be an excellent idea to know how to use optimized storage on Mac.
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I have been an Apple user for over seven years now. At iGeeksBlog, I love creating how-tos and troubleshooting guides that help people do more with their iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and Apple Watch. In my free time, I like to watch stand up comedy videos, tech documentaries, news debates, and political speeches.
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