I got a message saying I am out of storage and must pay for more within one month or be locked out. How can I clean out my gmail/google storage? I already have the last 20 years of photos and videos i want on a SSHD and various other cards, can I just clean out google photos and all archived emails. How would I do this and anything else to get my storage down significantly?
Is there any chance that the message is a scam or phishing attempt?
Don’t think so. It came up when I opened gmail.
I’ve seen warnings that you’re running out of storage, but never threatening to lock you out. Do you mean you got a gmail popup when you opened gmail, or an email message?
Anyway, you can search for “large” messages, and you delete photos and videos – videos will do a lot more to reduce usage.
Here is some info:
If you do delete a bunch of emails, make sure you empty your gmail trash, too, or the space won’t be freed up for a while.
A gmail pop-up. Same as the previous warnings saying I was at 80% full and asking me to purchase more space. In the past I have done as you suggested by deleting videos and large file and the notices went away. Been emptying my trash as well. Thinking I should delete all old files since I have physical backups and stop using google photos for automatic backups.
Depending, you may also have a ton of photos from a smartphone (if you’re a user) taking up space in google photos, which all tends to pull from the same total storage. Even if you’ve backed them up to offline storage (or, rather, probably especially) you may want to go through Photos and delete any you don’t want/need a backup of.
If you go to Manage your storage in Drive, Gmail & Photos - Google Drive Help while logged into your Google account, it SHOULD tell you exactly what’s using your space (across all the Google services) and how to clear it.
I say should because it’s apparently a little easier to do this if you have a paid Google One subscription, but even if you don’t, hopefully that page has at least the basic details..?
Be sure to empty the Trash folder in email and Photos once you clean up all your files, as stuff in Trash counts toward storage usage.
Before you delete anything you can visit takeout.google.com
This allows you to download everything in Gmail and photos and keep a copy locally.
I did not know that existed. Thanks!