Storage running out is the worst of all situations you can face on your computer. There’s a lot of personal data that you store on your PC, and when you get a prompt that you are running out of space, the first thing that comes to mind is, what should you delete? How to recover wasted storage space on Windows PC?
Some ways show you how to speed up your PC, manage RAM and processing power, keep your computer sorted, etc. But when it comes to storage, you can hardly do anything other than remove files to recover space.
Well, your storage devices, like any other PC resource, require regular maintenance. While you see important files stored on your hard drive, many unnecessary things are taking up your storage space.
In this blog, we will learn how to recover lost space on your PC by deleting unneeded files that are taking up space. Without further ado, let’s begin!
Read Also: How To Get More Storage on Your PC
2 Ways to Recover Wasted Storage Space on Windows
Understandably, you have files from your older PC or a backup of your smartphone on your PC that you don’t want to delete. So many of us prefer offline storage of files over any cloud service, which is OK.
What’s not okay is storing files that are useless to you. So many hidden files, duplicate photos, similar pictures, copied files, etc., take up storage space unnecessarily. The best way to recover wasted storage space is to find and delete these unwanted files.
But before we get started with the ways you can remove these files, let us first classify which files can be considered unnecessary. Let’s shed some light on how you can find them and recover storage space instantly!
What Files “Waste” Your Storage Space? How to Find & Remove them?
As discussed above, files that are no longer used or created without your knowledge. Yes, there are times when your PC has files that are neither visible nor important to you. To recover your storage space, you can use various tools. Some are inbuilt with Windows, while others are required to be installed.
Let’s take a look at these tools and understand how they can allow you to recover wasted storage space.
Run Disk Cleanup on Your PC
Disk Cleanup is an internal tool that you can use to scan your hard drive for unnecessary files and delete them right away. It is helpful in restoring wasted storage space. To initiate the disk cleanup process, you have to do is –
- Open Windows Explorer and go to This PC.
- Select the drive, you want to clean.
- Right Click on the drive, and go to Properties.
- In Properties, you will find Disk Cleanup in the General tab.
- Click on it to start the process.
- Once the scanning is completed, the cleanup wizard shows files you can remove to recover space.
You can either select the files to remove from the Files to delete list or click on Clean up System files to further find files worth deleting. If you select the latter option, it will search for more files and once done, will show all the files to delete and you can checkmark them and click OK to delete them.
You will get a prompt to delete files permanently. Click Delete Files.
Cleaning these files can help you recover space occupied by temporary files that are of no use, and neither do they affect your interaction with the PC.
Removing Duplicate Photos from Your Storage
A Picture library is one of the most crucial things to maintain on a PC. If these images are not treated right, they can take up a lot of space that you could have used for other purposes. The biggest issue that photos bring to the table is duplicate/similar pictures.
When you have an image on your PC, there is no need for another 5 duplicates or similar photos. Sometimes it happens due to the way they were clicked, sometimes, they are in a different location on the disk, and sometimes, edited pictures are saved along with the original image.
Removing such images from your PC can give you a lot of free space, which is where tools like Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro come in handy. It is a third-party tool that scans your entire PC for duplicate photos, finds them, groups them together, and curates them for you to preview and remove similar images.
To give you a perspective, here’s how the tool works –
- Download and install Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro on your PC.
- Run the application & select the folder you want to scan for duplicate images.
- Click on Scan for Duplicates once you have selected the destination folder. You can either choose a folder from your PC.
- Let the software find all the duplicate photos from your computer. Considering the number of images you have put up for scanning, it may take a few moments.
- Once this duplicate photo finder finishes scanning, you will see grouped image results.
Read Also: How To Identify, Group & Delete Similar Looking Photos
- After marking the images, click on Delete Marked. You can use the Automark feature if the number of images is too high.
- Click on OK when the software prompts whether you want to delete the marked images or not. The software will instantly remove all the redundant images from the folder.
The software is easy to use and comes with a free trial version. You can download the tool and check its effectiveness first. The idea is to accumulate all the duplicate images in a single place so that you can delete them and recover wasted storage space on Windows 10.
Parting Words
Using these techniques can help you recover a lot of space. The more storage space you have available, the better your PC performs. At this point, the best you can do is make the most out of the resources available, as upgrading your storage is not an option for everyone considering the prices and availability of drives.
I hope these ways help you recover wasted storage space on Windows 11 and operating system editions. Let me know in the comments how much storage you recovered after removing duplicate photos. Good luck!
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