7 Ways to Clean your Cloud Storage Drives

Every day, new technologies emerge and they bring new innovations and benefits that power the growth of businesses and individuals. One such technology is the cloud.

Cloud technology offers tremendous benefits that are usually outside the reach of small businesses and individuals. Cloud is flexible, scalable and easy to use & set up. This is why an increasing number of businesses are moving to the cloud to stay lean, competitive and benefit from it.

Clean up duplicate data from cloud storage drives with speed,  ease, and security. Cloud Duplicate Finder will automate the scan and delete process and perform it with perfection.

Clean up Duplicate Data from your Cloud Storage

Cloud Duplicate Finder is 100% safe, it uses the official cloud drive APIs from OneDrive, Google Drive, & Dropbox

Any data stored on the cloud is cloned and backed-up in real-time on multiple cloud servers to prevent the next data disaster. Your access to the cloud is secured with industry-standard file encryption technology and 2-Factor Authentication to confirm your identity. Moreover, the cloud enables businesses to provide “work from home” opportunities. With the cloud, working from home is not only possible, but also economical. It completely eliminates the need to set up physical offices, helping small businesses to reduce costs and compete with big competitors.

If you’re using the cloud storage drives to access and share your files, at one point in time, you might have run into low storage problems. Let’s discuss the top 7 ways to clean up your cloud storage drive and make room for new files.

Method 1: Empty the Trash Folder

The Trash or Bin folder in your cloud storage drive is equivalent to the Recycle Bin in Windows. All the deleted files are stored in the Trash folder for an infinite time or for a limited period of time depending on the policy of your cloud service provider. The actual time may vary from one cloud service to another.

In the case of Microsoft OneDrive, your deleted files remain in the Trash folder for a period of 30 days for normal users, and for a period of 93 days for Work or School accounts. After the expiry of this period, any files in the Trash folder are automatically permanently deleted.

Much like OneDrive, any files in your Google Drive Trash folder are automatically deleted after 30 days.

You can reclaim your lost storage by deleting the files in your Trash. This will help you free-up some storage.

Method 2: Change File Ownership

Did you know that you can also free-up your cloud storage by changing the ownership of your files and folders? This can be a handy option if you don’t have adequate storage but don’t want to upgrade the plan or delete any files either. You can simply transfer the ownership of your files and folders to one of your colleagues or friends, and the file or folder will start counting against their storage quota. Your cloud service provider will instantly release the space for that file or folder.

Note: File ownerships are not transferred instantly. When you change the owner of a file or folder, the new owner will be notified by an email. Until they approve the new ownership, the file or folder will still be counted against your storage quota.

Microsoft OneDrive

1. Sign in to your OneDrive account.
2. Go to the folder that contains files or folders you want to change ownership.
3. Right-click a file or folder and then choose the Details option from the right-click menu options.
4. In the new panel on the right-side, click on Manage Access.
5. Click on Direct Access.
6. Click on + (plus sign).
7. Enter the email address of the new owner or type their name and select it from the drop-down box.
8. Select “Can Edit”.
9. Check the option “Notify people”.
10. Click on the Grant Access button.

Google Drive

1. Sign in to your Google Drive account.
2. Right-click a file or folder to change ownership.
3. Select Share.
4. Click on the Down arrow next to the individual you want to transfer the ownership.
5. Click on Make Owner, followed by Send Invitation.

Dropbox

1. Sign in to your Dropbox account.
2. Go to the folder that contains files or folders you want to change ownership.
3. Right-click on a file or folder you want to share and then select the Share option.
4. Click the dropdown arrow next to the individual you want to share your file or folder to.
5. Click on Make Owner.

Method 3: Delete Duplicate Files

Duplicate files are identical versions of the original files. Re-uploading the same files multiple times can cause duplication. Not just that, if a single cloud account is connected with multiple devices such as PCs, Mac, tablet, phone, etc. it can cause a lot of duplicate files. This is particularly true when a copy of the original file is stored on both the phone and PC. Thankfully, deleting duplicate files is no more difficult. A popular third-party tool Cloud Duplicate Finder does this job over-the-cloud without needing to download a single file.

1. Visit the Cloud Duplicate Finder website.
2. Create a free account by clicking on the Sign Up.
3. Once your account is created, sign in to it.
4. Click on the cloud platform you use (for example, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3, etc).
5. Click on Add New Drive.
6. Enter the login credentials of your account and provide the required access privileges by clicking Yes or OK.
7. Once done, select All Files. To search only specific file types for duplicates, select the Custom option and choose your desired file type (for example, Documents, Images, Music, Videos, Archives, etc).
8. Click on Start Search.
9. Once the scan is finished, a list of duplicates will appear.
10. Click on Select Duplicates and choose the files you want to delete.
11. Click on Select Action > Permanent Delete to delete duplicate files from Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.

Method 4: Delete Email Attachments (Google Drive)

If you’re using Google Drive, there’s a catch. Everything in your Google account, including your email attachments, are counted against your storage quota. Deleting email attachments, especially older and larger ones, will help you free-up precious storage.

Gmail

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the Search Box, type “has:attachment larger:2M” (without quotes)
3. Gmail will list all emails with attachments larger than 2 MB in size.
4. To delete them all at once, click on the checkbox on the top followed by the Delete icon.

Method 5: Find & Delete Large Files

Microsoft OneDrive

OneDrive has an automated mechanism that lets you deal with this problem. OneDrive shows a list of all larger files in your account so that you can manually select and delete them all at once.

1. Sign in to your OneDrive account.
2. Click on your storage quota information on the bottom left (for example, 1.36 GB used of 5 GB)
3. Click on “What’s taking up space?”
4. Your files will be sorted from largest to smallest order.

Google Drive

Google Drive has a similar functionality.

1. Sign in to your Google Drive account.
2. Click on the Storage icon on the left side panel.
3. You will see a list of your Google Drive files sorted by size, largest first.

Dropbox

If you’re using Dropbox, unfortunately, there’s no in-house functionality to identify larger files. However, there are some workarounds.

1. Download Dropbox client for Windows.
2. Wait until all the files in your Dropbox server are synced offline.
3. Open File Explorer and go to the Dropbox folder.
4. In the Search box on the top right corner, type ““size:>500MB” (without quotes)
5. All files in your Dropbox account larger than 500 MB in size will be displayed.

Method 6: Remove Older File Versions (OneDrive)

If you’re working on your OneDrive or Google Drive files intensively, you can delete the older versions from the Version History.

Microsoft OneDrive

1. Open up your OneDrive.
2. Right-click a file you want to delete the old versions.
3. Select Version History.
4. Right-click each older version and choose the Delete Version option.

Google Drive:

1. Open up Google Drive.
2. Select a file to delete older versions.
3. Click on the More icon, followed by Manage Versions.
4. Click on the More icon next to an older version of the file and choose the Delete option.

Method 7: Compress the File

Compressing files will take less space. File compression is the process of re-encoding a file to reduce its size. Download all the large files to your PC, delete them from the cloud server, and then compress these files using a free tool called 7-Zip File Manager. After compressing your files, re-upload them again.