Clearing Storage Space on Your Chromebook [Tutorial]
707Clearing Storage Space on Your Chromebook [Tutorial]
If your Chromebook is running low on disk space, we recommend deleting files you don't need anymore.
Chromebooks are built and sold with the idea that you'll use cloud storage for most if not all of your files. A Chromebook's files are likely stored on Google Drive. Music is likely played on Google Play. Photos are likely viewed on Google Photos. (Or alternative cloud services such as, say, Dropbox, Spotify and Flickr.)
This web-centric view of the laptop makes Chromebooks easy to operate and inexpensive to acquire, but Chromebooks are not without some local storage. Typically, a Chromebook supplies either a 16GB or 32GB solid-state drive, but ChromeOS treats this local storage as a cache and may delete older files to make room for new files.
I wouldn't keep the only copies of treasured photos on my Chromebook's SSD, but it is useful as a temporary storage spot for downloaded files. (For example, to set a custom image for your desktop wallpaper, you first need to download an image from the Web.) Because local storage is deemphasized on a Chromebook, finding it isn't as straightforward as locating your C: drive.
With this guide, I'll show you how to access your Chromebook's local storage, find out how much free space remains and how to save, delete and move files.
Reach your Chromebook’s storage limit and you’ll start seeing errors when downloading and creating files. This isn’t hard to do, as Chromebooks often come with only 16 GB of internal storage.
You’re supposed to use online services and cloud-based storage rather than rely on local storage, but you can still do many things offline on a Chromebook. You may download large video files to watch offline on your Chromebook, for example.