People are always storing a lot of information. Various videos, photos, favorite movies, or books. Everyone has a lot of these things stored on their memory drive. Sooner or later there will be so many files that there is simply no more room for them. In such cases, people are helped by cloud storage services. For example Google Drive.
What is Google Drive
Google Drive is essentially a cloud storage drive. It is very convenient because there you can unload all that you rarely use, in addition, you can access your files from any device which will be connected to your Google account.
Google Cloud offers several attractive plans. You can choose 15 GB of free storage and when you run out of space, expand it with a few paid options. It also has the ability to automatically sync files from different devices and later you can share those files with other users. This is a very convenient and attractive feature.
But sometimes, no matter what your plan is, you may have a situation where you run out of disk space. All available GigaBytes will be occupied by your photos, videos, and other different files. In that case, it can be useful to organize everything and figure out which packs with files weigh more than the rest, so you can free them up if possible. It is quite difficult to do this because it isn’t easy to determine the size of each folder in the Google Drive web interface. There are several ways to solve this problem.
How to view large files in Google Drive
If your goal is to clear large files, there is one good way to see which files are the largest. Since you can’t see the exact size of folders in the web app, this is a good way to keep track of which files are taking up the most space and what you can get rid of. To do this you need to :
- Open Google Drive
- Then click on the gear icon in the right corner
- Then select “Settings“
- Then you need the “View items taking up storage” function
You will see a list of all the heaviest files in your Google Drive. Here you can immediately decide whether to delete them or save them somewhere else.
How to see the size of a folder with Backup and Sync
Backup and Sync is an app that can synchronize your cloud storage with your local hard drive. So it will display all the files and folders in Google Drive in the Google Drive File Explorer folder on your PC. You will then be able to view the size of the folders using your Windows file manager. Taking advantage of this trick is pretty easy, you need to :
- You need to download the software installer of the Backup and Sync application. Then open it and go through the installation process.
- You will need to log in to your Google account. It is important to make sure that this is the account you want Google Drive to belong to.
- Next, you will be offered to choose which folders you would like to save to Google Drive
- By default, the “Synchronize My Drive with this computer” option is selected. The local backup location for your Google Drive folder is the user’s directory. You can change it by selecting “Path“
- Next you need to select “Synchronize only these folders…“
All folders will be displayed in your local explorer. Their sizes will be displayed next to them. This is not the best solution to this problem, but it will be a good one-time solution.
