Stop Paying for Google Storage: Do This First! – DIY in 5 Ep 273

Опубликовано 19 апреля 2026, 13:01

“Storage almost full. Upgrade to Google One for $1.99 a month.” Have you been there? Dodge this digital tax with our improved cleanup routine.
Google offers its account holders 15GB of free storage, which can often last users years. The temptation to pull out the credit card at the first sign of running out of free storage may be significant, but why spend $24 a year when five minutes of online tidying can negate the need? Let’s get our storage in order!

Step 1: Analyze your usage
Don’t just start deleting random files. Identify where the bulk of your data is stored on the Google One website—not the Drive app, but the actual Google One storage page, which has a clean, color-coded breakdown of Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Tackle the biggest offender first. If it’s Drive, here’s how to do it.
Step 2: Filter by file size
Open Google Drive on your desktop. Click ‘Storage’ on the left. This sorts every single file you own by size. Often things like screen recordings show up first: massive and usually useless after a week. ZIP files: uploaded, extracted from, and then ignored even though they’re eating up half a gig by themselves. Duplicate exports can also be deleted: you don’t need the drafts, keep the one you do need.
If you do have a huge video you can’t part with, move it to an external drive rather than taking up rent space. A couple of large video files can easily take up 15-20% of your total allowance.
Step 3: Find unorganized “orphaned” files
Orphaned files are those files that can remain if a folder is deleted or if a shared folder disappears. They take up space but aren’t in a folder. You can find them by typing “is:unorganized owner:me” in the search bar. You can find all sorts of things: old PDFs, random uploads from five years ago…

Step 4: For Android users
Android users should check their backups. Google saves a backup of your app data and settings every time you get a new phone. Go to Drive, Storage, Backups. If you see an old Pixel 4 or a Galaxy S10 in there untouched for three years, delete it and get several hundred megabytes back.

Step 5: Delete old emails
If your Gmail account is full of old, archived emails, you’re likely sitting on a big pile of large attachments that you’ve long forgotten about. Go to your Gmail’s search bar, and type has:attachment larger:10M older_than:2y. Delete anything you no longer need!

Empty the trash (the real way)
The most important step for pruning Google storage is simple. Empty the trash. Deleted files in Google Drive don’t actually free up space until 30 days have passed, since they sit in the Trash folder for a month. To make a difference to your storage capacity, you have to manually empty three different iterations of Trash: the folder in Drive, the folder in Photos, and the folder in Gmail (and also Gmail’s Spam folder).

With that done, your task is complete! The goal is not to acquire more space but to stop hoarding digital junk. Go clean some files and join us for the next DIYin5!

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0:00 Intro
0:38 Analyze your usage
1:06 Filter by file size
1:48 Find unorganized “orphaned” files
2:18 For Android users
2:39 Delete old emails
2:57 Empty the trash