How to Free Up Storage in Chromebook

Sep. 23, 2024

Chromebooks are considered great devices for many use cases thanks to their simplicity and integration with apps from other platforms. This was not the case until Android and Linux support rolled out to the platform. Since Chromebooks come with lesser storage than typical Windows laptops, managing storage alongside the Linux container and Android apps could be challenging. If you’re having trouble managing the storage, here are a few ways to free up the storage on a Chromebook.

Besides Android and Chrome apps taking up space, Linux containers and applications take up tons of space, especially if you prefer Flatpaks over DEB packages. You can free up space by refactoring the Linux storage and removing non-essential stuff.

How to Check Your Chromebook’s Storage

Before we get started with the steps to manage your Chromebook storage, it’s important to know exactly what things are taking up the most storage on your Chromebook. You can easily check the storage distribution by going to Storage Management in Settings. Here’s how.

This will give you an idea of what platform’s taking up the most storage. From here, you could ideally start by removing unnecessary stuff from specific sections.

If you’re running out of space on your Chromebook, the following methods can help you clear some of them out so that you can go back to using ChromeOS like before.

The easiest way to free up your Chromebook’s storage is by deleting downloaded files and folders from the Chromebook’s file manager.

You need to keep in mind that the files you delete once, can’t be restored. You can also check out our dedicateddelete files on Chromebookguide to check out more options.

When you browse the internet, data tends to accumulate in your browser as cache, which helps load the assets faster the next time you visit the same web pages. Deleting the cache won’t affect your Chromebook and will free up some space.

Chrome and Android apps usually don’t take up as much storage as Linux apps but considering the sheer number of apps and games you can download, it can quickly eat up storage space. Here’s how to delete Chrome and Android apps on Chromebook to free up space.

One of the easiest ways to restore storage on a Chromebook is by repartitioning Linux container storage or deleting it if you no longer need it.

Drive internals contain local data files used to store cache from the Offline folder. Here’s how to delete it to free up storage on your Chromebook.

ChromeOS was created to leverage Google Drive and since it comes with native Google Drive support, moving files from the operating system to the same is quite seamless. It’s also a great way to free up storage on your Chromebook.

You can also use Google’sQuick Share feature to share filesfrom a Chromebook to an Android device quickly.

If you have a user account of a friend or family member, who only made an account to try out the Chromebook, you should remove them to free up storage on the Chromebook.

Multiple user accounts tend to take a lot of storage. Note that you can only remove other user accounts if you are the owner of the Chromebook, who happens to be the first user to sign in to the device. To remove the owner’s account, you need reset/powerwash your Chromebook.

You can remove user accounts on the login screen. Simply click on thearrow iconand selectRemove account.

If none of the aforementioned ways to free up storage on Chrome OS worked for you, your last resort is power washing your Chromebook. Powerwash is a factory reset equivalent on your Chromebook and will restore your Chromebook to a factory state.

Keep in mind, this will delete all your local files stored in internal storage. Hence, make sure to back up all your important files and folders. We have a detailed guide onhow to Powerwash a Chromebook, but if you’re looking for a TL;DR:

To powerwash your Chromebook, go toSettings>Advanced>Reset Settings>Reset. Now, your Chromebook will restart and factory reset itself.

Freeing up space on your Chromebook could come in handy, especially if you want to play some of thebest games for ChromebooksviaSteam. Besides, once more space is freed up, you can extend the Linux partition to install more Linux Desktop apps like VS Code and use software development or productivity tools.