Ramscaping Your Google Account Week 6 – Clipping Drive
Welcome to Week 6 of our Ramscaping challenge! This week we continue, and conclude, our personal Drive cleanup. We’ll be searching for the oldest files in Drive, checking we aren’t needlessly backing up files via Drive for Desktop, and taking out the trash. However, this isn’t the end of clean-up in Drive, as next week we will begin discussing Shared Drives and their importance.
⏪ If you missed last week, click here to see last week’s post.
🎉 Congratulations to Jazmine G., our Week 5 Ramscaping winner!
🗓️ Weekly Goal: Review at least 50% of your oldest and unused files and trash them.
🔥 Stretch Goal: Review at least 80% of your oldest and unused files and trash them.
Searching for the oldest files and stale files
Like we’ve seen with Gmail previously, a great way to find files that are no longer needed is to search for them by date. Google Drive provides two search operators that work well combined or separately: createdbefore:YYYY-MM-DD and before:YYYY-MM-DD. These search for if a file was created before a certain date and if a file was last modified before a certain date. They can be combined to ensure that we’re only checking for aging files that haven’t seen any modifications. We also want to make sure that we are only checking for emails that are owned by us, so we add another search operator, owner:me, to the search to narrow down the results:
Once you have your results, you can begin reviewing and trashing items that haven’t been used in a long time. You can also add additional search operators and search chips to further narrow your search.
Reminder: Don’t forget to submit an RM-3 where appropriate before moving on!
Taking out the trash
Now it’s time to empty the trash. Remember that the action of emptying Trash in Google Drive is permanent. Head over to Trash, click “Empty trash,” then “Delete forever”
Next week, we’ll start to learn about Shared Drives which can be used to store items that belong to a team or project.This was posted as part of our “Ramscaping your Google Account” summer challenge.
Categories Ramscaping Your Google Account, Storage Cleanup