Despite the ever-increasing storage space provided by the hard drives of our computers, we still end up exhausting this resource due to our incessant habit of downloading material off the Internet. Downloading material itself from the Internet is not the problem, the problem is that even after the downloaded material has served its purpose, we forget to delete it.
This proves to be an unnecessary burden on the computer’s hard drive. To make matters even worse, our computer also stores a lot of temporary files which are of no use and they unnecessarily occupy a huge chunk of the computer’s hard drive.
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Now back in the old days, we would have to periodically perform the mundane task of freeing up storage space. These tasks included deleting temporary files, emptying the Recycle Bin and scrutinizing the download folder. The troubling aspect of this all was that we had to perform these tasks either manually or semi-manually using a third-party software program.
Fear no more, as with the Windows 10 Creators Update, a new feature saw the light of the day that keeps an eye on the amount of unnecessary material stored on your hard drive and automatically clears it from time to time. This new feature is called Storage Sense. Storage Sense is an optional feature (disabled by default). However, once it is enabled, it will automatically delete the temporary files created by your web browser and other apps. Files that are lying in the Recycle Bin for more than 30 days are also removed automatically. You can even tweak this feature so that files are permanently deleted once they’ve completed 24 hours of sitting in the Recycle Bin. In situations where you are critically running low on storage space, Storage Sense will even offer you the option to delete the previous version of Windows 10 to instantly clear up some storage space.
The following lines provide a step by step guideline on how to enable Storage Sense in Windows 10:
- Step 1
The first step is to navigate to storage settings. You can do this by going to Settings and selecting System | Storage. Another option is to press Windows Key + Q, which will lead you to Cortana (your personal digital assistant provided by Windows) and ask it to open up Storage settings for you.
- Step 2
Once you have reached Storage settings the next step is to enable Storage Sense. By default, Storage Sense is disabled in Windows 10, which means you will have to enable it yourself.
- Step 3
When you enable Storage Sense, only certain features will be activated such as deleting temporary files and clearing the Recycle Bin. The rest of the features, you will have to activate yourself. You can do this by clicking on the link that says Change how we free up space automatically. This will lead you to the configurations page. Here you are given the option to delete the files in the Downloads folder that have not been changed for 30 days. This proves to be a very handy feature since most of the times we download material and later forget to delete it. This way the material will automatically get cleaned up after it has been present in the Downloads folder for a certain period of time.
- Step 4
Whenever a new Windows update is installed on a computer system, certain temporary files from the older versions continue to sit on your computer’s hard disk. This is done so that you can return to the older version of Windows whenever you want to. These temporary files can sometimes amount up to GBs of data. If you wish you can remove these temporary files belonging to older versions of Windows by checking the box that says Delete previous versions of Windows and clicking the Clean Now button.
One should keep in mind that Storage Sense is only relevant for junk files, however, if you are looking to clean up more space, then the following information might come in handy. The most important habit that you should instill in yourself if you want the storage space to remain in control is that you should delete unused apps from time to time. This can be done by visiting the Apps and Features page. Here you will find a list of apps along with the timestamp of the last time you used that particular app. You can review the apps and then uninstall the ones which you no longer need.
