The wide span and capable reach of the internet has not exempted storage, even having entire companies like Dropbox built around them. But the topic of discussion here is google drive space, so before we go into the various ways by which you can maximize your Google Drive storage space, let’s catch up on the basics.
Optimize Your Google Drive Space
With Google drive you have unrestricted access to your files from anywhere in the world using any device without doing more than sign into your google account. While all the while assured you’re your files are safely backed up on the cloud server without risk of you losing them. Google Drive also allows you to share and work on files with colleagues and friends easily without having to trade documents back and forth. With all these goodies, it’s not surprising that you want to optimize your storage space and get the best of it.

 With a new google account, you get a one account access to all of google suit applications such as Gmail, YouTube, Google maps, google Play store as well as google office packages. All this comes with a 15GB google drive free storage. The catch here is that this space fills up pretty quickly which would be a major problem especially for android users since pretty much all you do on your devices revolve around the google suite and hence google drive, and since most personal users are not down to increasing their storage space by paying, especially when you easily can avoid filling the space unnecessarily. Hence, the aim of this article to help you maximize your Google Drive storage space. If that sounds interesting, let’s get into it:

 1. Take Advantage of Google Productivity apps

Google productivity apps include google doc, google slide, google sheets and forms. They enable you to work on various file formats just like Microsoft office packages. You can save storage space on google drive by saving your documents and files in the google formats rather than typical Microsoft office formats. This is because google gives unlimited cloud space for this files as long as they are in the goggle format, so, if you have a lot of important documents or files on your google drive, convert them to their respective google formats, upload them and free a couple of more space.

 2. Earn More Space

After the basic 15 gigabytes of space allocated to every new google account, users can pay to use more spaces. But what most don’t know is that you can actually earn more space by contributing to a number of google platforms. An example of this is through google maps, by contributing and verifying locations; submitting reviews and uploading pictures to google maps as a local guide, you earn points and badges on your google account and google rewards contributors with certain badge levels with including more google drive space up to 1 TB. This might sound like a bit of work, after all, who wants to do more work, especially not for a couple of storage space but you can contribute leisurely and you might find out that this could be a bit fun. You can also check out google Crowdsource for more ways you can contribute.

 3. Clear Duplicate and trash items

More often than not, we usually keep multiple copies of the same file, which will clog up more space and hinder you from adding new content to your google drive. Yes, it can be quite difficult and exhausting to hunt down each and every file copy and start deleting them individually, what you can do is get find and download a sweeper app and have it track and automatically remove duplicate files and documents. Check your trash also and remove corrupt files and broken files that are usually but still take up a major chunk of your precious space, once again a sweeper app would come in handy and it should help you track and remove redundant file and packages. Don’t go easy on easy files as well, enable hidden files and clear out garbage that hide and suck up your storage space.

 4. Take advantage of google social apps

Files that take up the most space on most people’s storages are pictures, music and video files. And we are usually stuck up in quandary between which file to keep and which to delete to free up more space. Well, not anymore. You can benefit from several google media platforms and save your media files on google platforms. For instance, google offers free storage to “high quality” pictures on your drive, also save pictures on Google Photos directly which offers a different storage for pictures from the drive. Google Music also give you a free storage independent of the drive for up to 50,000 tracks. You ca also upload your favourite videos to YouTube and enjoy an unlimited space for all your beloved videos. The trick here is to set your account viewing settings private which makes sure only you have access to your files.

 5. Purchasing Certain Devices

Using some Google devices such as Google Pixels smartphones or Chromebook come with additional perks of having unlimited google drive free storage. So if you are one that uses heavy cloud space, you might consider investing in a Google device and get the best value for your money.

You only have to pay a little more attention to your files and documents to maximize your google drive space and the five means above is more than enough to get you started.