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If your laptop's storage is upgradeable, you can easily buy a bigger drive online-either a 2.5-inch SSD or an M.2 drive, whichever your laptop supports. So once you start encountering that “Disk full” warning, know that you'll probably want a bigger drive in the somewhat near future. You can repeat this process every few months, but eventually, it's going to become tiresome-or you're going to run out of stuff you're willing to delete. Temporary files will return, your cloud storage will fill up, and you'll keep collecting music, movies, and other files. Ultimately, most of these solutions are temporary.
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If you choose the external drive option, just remember that you should also back up those files to the cloud if they're truly important to you-external drives can and will fail just like regular hard drives, and if that's your only copy of the data, you still need it backed up somewhere. Just remember that if you use a service like Dropbox, it may sync those files to your computer automatically, so you'll have to go into the program's settings and unselect those files so they're stored in the cloud only. Windows can automatically move unused files to OneDrive using the aforementioned Storage Sense feature, but again, I prefer to have manual control. You don't need to waste precious storage on your laptop keeping these kinds of things around-put them on an external drive or upload them to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or OneDrive. For example, I have gigabytes of work and tax documents that I rarely need to access but want to keep for a few years, and my wife has some projects from her grad school days she wants access to if she needs them.
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If you find files you aren't ready to get rid of yet, you might be able to move them somewhere else for safe keeping. Offload Files to External or Cloud Storage
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