Fast Company Magazine
Google storage full again? Before you pay for another subscription, there’s a clever $5 fix worth knowing about.
The shockingly easy fix for your Gmail low-storage nightmare
Author: JR Raphael
It’s no exaggeration to say that cloud storage has changed the way we work—and, to some extent, even the way we live.
Gone are the days of having your mountains of saved emails exist only on a single local system, without easy instant access from any device in front of you—and dealing with the all-too-common reality of losing your entire email archives when something goes awry.
Gone are the days of painstakingly copying all your photos from an old phone to a new one or panicking over the idea of having lost all of those memories when a phone falls into the toilet and fails.
And gone are the days of digging through a drawer of unlabeled, identical flash drives just to find a single silly presentation from six months ago.
With all the convenience of always-available access, though, comes a problem that more and more of us are now encountering in our cloud storage journeys: Sooner or later, inevitably, keeping all your info in the cloud comes at a cost.
That’s especially true with the increasingly large and high-resolution photos and videos we’re all capturing on our modern-day smartphones. But it’s also an issue that adds up over time with years upon years of email attachments in an archive-encouraging service such as Gmail, duplicate downloads in a place like Google Drive, and forgotten old documents and PDFs connected to Google Docs or any other such service.
So what if there were a work-around—a way to easily eliminate dead weight you no longer need while also spreading out the stuff you do actually want to avoid that lifelong $20 to $200 annual Google storage bill?
My fellow digital file hoarder, our answer is here—in the form of a clever new service that costs $5 once, up front, and could easily save you hundreds of dollars over time.
Taming the Google storage trap
Before we get to the tool that’ll solve your Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive storage woes once and for all, you need to meet a fella named Yair Levin.
Levin has spent most of his life building fintech products—everything from an employee wallet product for the payroll processor Gusto (an honorable mention winner in Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Awards) to a complete investing platform for financial services company SoFi.
But the problem that he hadn’t found a way to address came in the form of a decidedly non-tech-savvy mother-in-law.
Levin’s mother-in-law, you see, calls him once a year—like clockwork—to complain that her email is full and she can no longer send messages. As his family’s designed IT support specialist, he then spends an entire afternoon sitting with her and sifting through her cloud storage, attachment by attachment and file by file, to find places to free up space.
“It’s 90 minutes sitting next to my mother-in-law, going through her inbox one email at a time, explaining what a promotional email is,” he says. “Every one of them is a negotiation: ‘But I might want that coupon.’”
For Levin, that ongoing obligation sparked something. He had a burning desire to avoid that experience, yes, but more broadly, a realization that he wasn’t alone in this struggle.
Surely, he figured, there must be an easier way—a way to accurately identify unneeded items throughout one’s cloud storage and find places to put the files you do want to keep without accepting another eternally recurring expense. The limited options offered by Google itself sure weren’t it.
“The reality is, when I wanted to delete items to stay on my [default Google storage allotment of] 15 GB, Google took me hostage,” Levin says. “They showed me the largest videos, which were my daughter’s first steps, her first goal in soccer, me and my wife on our honeymoon—and they say, ‘Hey, you want to delete these, or do you want to pay me?’ And it’s like—come on, buddy.”
Levin put his software-building cap on and started poking around. He quickly came to two realizations: First, there is a better way to find and remove space-sucking files that we don’t actually need. Google just isn’t giving it to us.
And second, there’s a brilliant power-user hack to expand our available Google cloud storage exponentially, without ever paying a dime. It’s just traditionally been very off the radar and taken a lot of work to manage.
So Levin decided it was time to democratize both of those things and make them readily available—and affordable—to anyone (even, and maybe especially, to someone like his own mother-in-law).
The mission for a fix
With a recent side project of creating a privacy-centric batch photo processing app for Google Photos firmly in mind, Levin set out to reinvent how we think about cloud storage.
The result is something he’s calling, aptly enough, Google Storage Cleaner. (He also made an equivalent for Microsoft, if that ecosystem is more your cup of cola.)
Open the website, click the button to begin, and install the Chrome extension at the heart of the operation—then, within a matter of moments, Google Storage Cleaner will scan your entire Google cloud storage (which includes Gmail, Drive, Photos, and every other app and service that ties into that space) and do two things:
First, it gives you a detailed breakdown of exactly what types of files you can clear out, leaning on thoughtful processing and customizable parameters to avoid ensnaring anything that might be important.
On my primary personal Google account, for instance, it suggested freeing up 3.1 GB of space by eliminating 70,000-plus old promotional emails and another 25.2 GB(!) by batch-deleting nearly 150,000 old emails in my social, updates, and forums categories within Gmail.
All of that’s followed by a list of “easy wins,” which is basically the same sort of stuff (and the only stuff) Google gives you in its official Google One Storage Manager tool—things like erasing blurry photos, screenshots, and duplicate files.
By default, Levin’s version starts with files that are at least three months old and automatically excludes any emails that are starred or marked as important. It also avoids emails with subjects or attachments that have words like “receipt,” “invoice,” “order,” “contract,” and “wedding.” You can expand that list as you see fit as well as add in specific protected senders whose messages will never be flagged for pruning.
That’s all well and good, and it can often clear out a good amount of space—nearly 30 GB, on my account. But the app’s real power is in the second piece of this puzzle.
Beneath all those basics, Google Storage Cleaner has a section called “Your biggest items.” As you’d imagine, this is where it lists out especially large files in Drive, hefty images and videos in Photos, and bulky attachments in Gmail.
Notably, these are the very same sorts of items Google’s Storage Manager will simply suggest you delete. Levin’s tool, in contrast, asks you to look over them carefully—and then, in a brilliant twist, to consider moving any or all of them to secondary Google accounts.
“It’s a technique known in the pro community that I’ve been leveraging for years,” Levin says.
The short explanation is this: Google allows you to create any number of regular, free individual accounts, and each comes with 15 GB of complimentary cloud storage.
Google also lets you share files and photos from one account to another, which gives the other account complete access to those files, effectively in the same way as if they had been saved directly in that account’s own storage.
But with this sharing setup, the files don’t count against the other account’s quota.
Already, you could create an extra Google account, transfer large files from a primary account to that secondary one, share access to those files back to the primary account, and delete the originals to free up the space. You could even do that over and over again to expand the available Google storage without having to pay.
Realistically, though, that’s a time-consuming migraine that few sane mortals would want to accept. It also opens up the door to user error and inadvertently losing important files.
Google Storage Cleaner eliminates all the complexity and risk and makes the process as simple as a few quick clicks. You just decide which files you want to migrate, click the “Move to another account” button, and confirm.
The site will walk you through exactly what’s going to happen and prompt you to connect the secondary account. It can support up to three extra Google accounts, for a total of 45 GB of additional space and 60 GB total, including your original account’s allotment.
(Levin says he drew the line at three to avoid venturing into potential abuse terrain or violating any terms of service.) It can even help create another Google account for you, right then and there, as part of its process.
After a brief delay—no more than a few to several seconds, in my experience, though the process could presumably take longer depending on how much material is involved—the site will confirm that it moved each file, double-checked its integrity and the success of the transfer, then shared everything back to your primary account and deleted the originals to give you the same effective access without any of the measured space.
You can undo the process for up to 30 days, if you have second thoughts—but for all intents and purposes, nothing should seem noticeably different in practice other than your primary Google account having more available storage. It’s really quite brilliant.
“We’re not looking to break any laws. We’re playing nicely with Google,” Levin says. “We’re just giving hard-working individuals the ability to flex a little more control over their systems—and to make sure as they go through the process of deleting items, that they do it with peace of mind.”
Speaking of peace of mind, one critical question that comes to my mind with anything like this is how much access I’m granting the system in question. That’s precisely why Levin structured his tool as a browser extension. That approach enables it to handle everything locally, in your own desktop web browser, without ever sending any of your personal info or Google account data to a server.
The program’s privacy policy is clear about how the mechanics work and the fact that the extension never stores or so much as sees the contents of emails, files, photos, or anything else connected to you, beyond just the same basic web analytics virtually every website collects.
Last but not least are the details of the price. Google Storage Cleaner will perform its full scan of your storage for free and offer to do three of its simpler cleanup mechanisms without any charge.
To unlock the full suite of options—including the simple management of the multiple account file-juggling hack—you’ll have to pony up 5 bucks, one time, for unlimited lifetime access for whatever primary account you’re using. No subscriptions, no expirations, no other fees whatsoever.
For perspective, once you go over Google’s 15 GB free storage limit, you’d be looking at paying a minimum of $2 a month to Google, forever, for a cloud storage upgrade. With that in mind, a onetime payment of $5 almost seems shockingly reasonable—a contrast that Levin says comes down to the difference between dealing with a one-person indie developer like him and dealing with a corporate behemoth.
“Google’s business incentives are just misaligned with the customer incentives,” he says.
Now, at least, Levin won’t have to spend this Thanksgiving debating the archival value of an expired Bed Bath & Beyond coupon. And for the rest of us, his creation may be the rare chance to find a way out of yet another endless subscription obligation—for roughly the cost of a couple of cantaloupes.
Credits: TCA, LLC.