Support our independent tech coverage. Chrome Unboxed is written by real people, for real people—not search algorithms. Join Chrome Unboxed Plus for just $2 a month to get an ad-free experience, access to our private Discord, and more. Learn more about membership here.
START FREE TRIAL (MONTHLY)START FREE TRIAL (ANNUAL)
Are you a file hoarder? If you’re like me, you probably are and don’t even know it. I recently upgraded to the 2TB tier of Google Drive simply because I can’t seem to keep my numerous files and folders under control and was constantly capping out my legacy 100GB plan. That said, I have come to realize that much of my lost storage space is due to a massive amount of duplicate, temporary, and outdated files. I mean, seriously, who has time to scan through thousands of files looking for duplicates or files that can be deleted?
Thankfully, there’s an app for that. Clean Drive for Google Drive is a freemium app that quickly scans your Google Drive in search of ways that you can optimize space. Clean Drive is the perfect tool to help keep your Google Drive clean and organized by identifying duplicate and temporary files, highlighting large files, and showing which items are a year or more in age. This makes it easy to spot files that you may have overlooked and gives you the ability to delete them directly from the Clean Drive dashboard.
If you’d like to get a closer look at Clean Drive and all its features, check out Michael’s full write-up here. I gave Clean Drive a go and in mere seconds, it identified over 5GB of duplicate files in my Google Drive account. Along with that, it showed my that I had over 50GB of files that were more than a year old. Some of them, I still needed but it helped me to filter out all of the newer items so that I could identify out of date files that could be removed. A few simple clicks, and they were gone. Easy, peasy.
The latest updated to Clean Drive added the temporary files category but also adds the ability to filter by file extension. This is very useful if you have a lot of .exe files you need to archive or large image/video projects that you may need to move or simply delete. Files can be filtered by thirteen different file extensions which is something you can’t do with just Google Drive. The free version of Clean Drive allows you to delete up to 100 files or folders a month and there’s even and mobile app available from the Google Play and Galaxy stores. You can even find a Workspace add-on in the Workspace Marketplace.
If you’re serious about getting your digital life in order, why not start the New Year with a tidied up Google Drive account and save some money in the process. While the free plan is very useful, upgrading to even the base paid tier gets you access to more monthly scans, 10,000 deletions per months and much more. That plan is only $4/month when you pay annually. You can bump up to premium for only $12/month and get access to half a million deletions per month and the ability to clean up shared folders. From now until December 30th, you can knock 30% off of any of these annual plans when you use the promo code BESTDEAL22 at checkout. Even if you aren’t sure you need to clean up your Google Drive, it’s worth running a free scan. You’ll be surprised at how much dead weight is just hanging around in your Drive folders.

