Use This Free Hidden Auto-Cleanup Feature Every User Should Know!

Howdy folks, Brett here. On both Windows 10 and Windows 11, to free up disk space on your C drive that is silently filling it up with junk, I'll show you how to enable and properly configure the built-in Storage Sense feature that does this automatically on a schedule. I'll go over the best settings to help ensure that your PC stays clean and performs at its best. To enable and configure Storage Sense, we'll need to open the Settings app by right-clicking on the Start menu in the taskbar and selecting Settings. You can also open it using the keyboard shortcut, which is the Windows key plus I key. Storage Sense is somewhat buried in here. To easily find it, in the left pane, select System. Here on the right, you might need to scroll down, select Storage. This will show you what is taking up space on your drives. The big ones here for me are installed apps and temporary files. I normally keep Storage Sense enabled on all my PCs. On this one here, I just disabled it for this tutorial. Scroll down. In Storage Management is where you'll find Storage Sense. If you're not familiar with this feature, it was released back in 2017 as a modern version of the old disk cleanup tool, which is still around. Storage Sense is a disk cleanup feature that can automatically clear temporary system files, manage your downloads folder, empty the recycle bin, and content in OneDrive. If you see that it's turned off, to enable it, click the toggle to turn it on. To configure it so it works best for you, click into it. In Cleanup of Temporary Files, if not checked, click the box to check it. As it says here, keep Windows running smoothly by automatically cleaning up temporary system and app files. Let's now go to the section, Configure Cleanup Schedules. The first one being Run Storage Sense. The default to run Storage Sense is set to during low free disk space. I don't like the default here. That would not be good enough as drives will perform better and last longer when they have more free space available. As the space on the drives fills up, it takes longer to find empty space to write new data, reducing write speeds. Every day is too often, and every month could let too much space be accumulated between runs. So I recommend having Storage Sense run automatically every week, which is a good middle ground for this. Below that, in Delete Files in my Recycle Bin, if they have been there for over, the default is 30 days. Your other choices are never, one day, 14 days, and 60 days. I think one day is too short. If you ever need to recover a file, you may have deleted by accident. 60 days might work for you if you don't send too many files to the Recycle Bin. Just a reminder, files in the Recycle Bin do still take up drive space until it's empty. 14 days might work for you if you do send a lot of files to the Recycle Bin. In my case, I actually do prefer the default of 30 days, which I find is enough time to recover an accidentally deleted file. Now for the next one. For Delete Files in my Downloads Folder, if they have not been opened for more than, I want to caution you first. If you plan to have this set to anything other than never, which is the default, make sure that you have moved anything in your Downloads Folder that is important to another folder because those files will get deleted with any other setting than never. You have the choice here, other than never, one day, up to 60 days. My recommendation here is to set it to 60 days. That should be ample time to move important downloads in case you forgot to move them and it's often enough to ensure they're not filling up unnecessarily. Let's scroll down. Lastly here, in Locally Available Cloud Content, in some cases, if you have more than one, one drive account, you may see more than one drop down listed. In my case, there's only one. Setting this to anything other than never, storage sense, will free up drive space, removing unused cloud-backed content from your PC. You can set this from anywhere from one day up to 60 days. I've always felt that 30 days seems sufficient. Files and folders you've set to always keep on this device won't be deleted. If you've never run Storage Sense before or haven't manually cleared out your data in the Disk Cleanup tool, I recommend clicking Run Storage Sense Now here at the bottom. This will do everything right now that you set earlier. If you have anything set to never, those files will not get cleared doing this, only those that you set on a schedule. So I'll run this now. It'll say Cleaning Up Files. This may take a few minutes. After cleaning up the files, Storage Sense will only run on the schedule you had already set. Thanks for watching. Hopefully this video helped. 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