The ultima te guide to

“Storage almost full”. You start sweating, watching your every move. You’re thinking “Just one more!”. But before you know it, it’s too late. Three ruthless words: “No more storage”. End of the game. Are we bound to finish this way? Whether it’s our smartphone, computer or tablet, our needs for storage keep growing but our devices don’t keep up. We’ve compiled the 10 best ways to break the evil circle & never run out of storage anymore.

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Find and remove duplicate files

How hard?    

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How efficient?    

The cool thing about it: You will no longer have that exact same picture of your dog 10 times in your library

No need to have the same files twice right? First thing to do to free up some space on your computer is to find and remove those duplicate files. To ease up the task, get one of the following apps: Gemini (Mac), or Duplicate Cleaner (Windows). Those apps will:

• Look out for duplicate files. You can specify which folders or files you want to look in.



• Clean up your image library & look for the same photos cropped and resized differently.



• Once you selected the duplicates (according to your own criteria), you can compare and choose which one you want to keep.



• Scan and compare audio files so you won’t double your music library for nothing.

GOOD To know Good to know for Mac owners, iTunes has a built-in app that can find duplicate music and video files in your library. On the iTunes toolbar, you can find it under View >> Show Duplicate Items. Then, you can easily remove the duplicate items.

2

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Scan your disk and move some stuff to external storage

How hard?    

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The cool thing about it: You’ll know the heart of the beast

Which kind of files are taking most place? Do a scan to know what you’re dealing with. You can use Disk Inventory X (Mac) or WinDirStat (Windows) Those tools will scan your hard drive disk and break its contents down into “blocks”. The bigger the files, the bigger the blocks. It is usually color-coded, which makes it easy for you to see which types of files are eating up yo ur space. Is it videos, photos, system files?

If media is your biggest space hog, why not use an external hard drive to store them? You can store on an external drive anything that is not system files (NEVER ever delete those ones!). I won’t lie: it’s not a super cool solution because you’ll need to plug your hard drive back to your computer to access those files, but at least it’s efficient.

GOOD To know A system file is a file (usually with a .sys filename extension) that is ESSENTIAL for running Windows or Mac Os properly on your computer. You should absolutely not rename, move or delete any file system or your computer risks to stop functioning properly.

3

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Uninstall useless Applications

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The cool thing about it: You have probably forgotten some of the awesome things your computer can do

How many apps are you not using .. at all? Determine which apps are using the most space, and those that you’re not using at all. To do so, open a Folder Windows, and go to Applications.

See if there are any that take a lot of space and are of no use for you. If you think you will sleep better without them then .. just trash them!

4

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Clear the cache

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The cool thing about it: You delete what’s invisible

Remove temporary files that clog out your storage. Here we are talking about Cookies, Internet cache, Internet history, recent files, documents used... There are here to help you save time while browsing the web or opening files, but they can fill up a lot of space. Usually, your computer automatically removes temporary files, but a dedicated application can do the job better and find more files to clean up.

CCleaner is the most popular one, and works both for Mac and Windows. You can run it to clean out your system and/or web browser.

GOOD To know Keep in mind that cleaning your browser history will slow the loading pages next time you surf the web, so don’t rush on this one. Also, your browser will start rebuilding the cache as you browse (it’s an automatic setup), so it would save some space for a short amount of time only.

5

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Be more organized

(and therefore avoid storing files uselessly)

How hard?    

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The cool thing about it: EVERYTHING! Definitely our favorite

Get HAZEL. Create rules that will automatically help you being more organized. How does it work? Super simple: If …. then ….

Not clear? Here are some examples: “If I download a photo, then it’s sent directly to my photo library”. “If I take a screenshot, then it’s renamed and sent to “Inspirations” folder.” “If a file stays more than two weeks on my desktop, then it’s moved into the “to be checked out” folder” You will create powerful workflows to automatically process your files, without noticing it. No lost files, no clogs, more space, ... feeling better :)

6

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Remove some language files

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The cool thing about it: You get to know how many languages you don’t speak (yet).

Do you need that Armenian language in case of …? Yes, probably not. Especially true for Mac, which stores thousands of languages libraries (hundred of megabytes of space). As you’ll probably use one only, you can use MONOLINGUAL to remove the unused ones. Life Tip Keep 3 languages you don’t speak yet, and learn them ;)

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Know what’s eating all your space, then decide

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The cool thing about it: Trash the crap, oh yeah.

On iOS:

On Android:

For a quick check, go to Settings >> General >> Storage >> Manage storage.

Use the built-in storage tool. To find it, open the Settings screen and tap storage. You will see how much space is used by your apps, photos, videos, cached data and more. Then, you can adjust: for example if you tap “Pictures and Videos”, it will open your gallery and you will then be able to delete the ones you’d like.

You’ll be able to review which apps are taking space, clear up your photos and videos, delete a few albums, and probably delete the apps that you’re not using at all.

Know what’s eating all your space, then decide

8

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Delete attachments

aka pics and videos stored in your apps

How hard?    

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How efficient?    

The cool thing about it: You get to delete other people’s stuff!

By default, your device stores all the images and videos you receive and send through some apps. On What’s App:

On Messages:

To locate the attachments stored, you need to go to the “Contact Info” interface for individual contacts by tapping on the name. From here, touch “View All Media”, select and delete the files. You can also set up your account to unable the “Save Incoming Media” option. Which will enable you to keep receiving the cat photos your mum is sending you, and keep taking pictures as well!

You probably doubled the storage by receiving photos and videos, and you can clear them up to free up some space. To do so, tap “Details” in the top-right corner of your individual threads. You can see the attachments appearing, at the bottom of the Details interface. Hold on the images, select several if you want to, then press the “trash” button.

Delete the attachments - aka pics and videos stored in your apps

9

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Clear up the cache from social networking apps.

How hard?    

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The cool thing about it: Those who did everything else and still need space!

A\ Facebook, Twitter, and others Stock Apps On iOS:

On Android:

Those apps sometimes cache data right onto your iPhone, and become secret storage hogs without you noticing. They routinely cache web pages and profile pictures to speed up future downloads… To fix it quickly, you just need to delete the app, and re-download it. It should solve your problems. Of course, you can apply that to any apps eating up your storage space.

Go to your Settings >> Apps folder, then tap on the app you wish to clear data and cache.

GOOD To know Just delete the Facebook app from your phone for good, and check out your notifications from your browser! If you keep the messenger app only, then what else do you need? It even loads faster.

9

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Clear up the cache from social networking apps.

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B\ instagram:

D\ Web browser:

On iOS, your phone automatically resets the storage space the app uses every week, so the app shouldn’t become bigger and bigger. If you want to do it manually, same thing: uninstall the app, and redownload it. Don’t worry, your profile and pictures will be safe.

Web browsers store cached data of websites. There’s history and cookies too. By clearing those, you will free up some space. (Although, keep in mind that clearing your history will slow your browsing for next time). For both iOS and Android, go to your settings, find the browser you’d like to clear out and clear our the cache.

On Android, the app caches photos to make the Instagram experience faster for you and save bandwidth, as you don’t have to re-download photos over your carrier’s network. If you want to delete this manually, go to settings => Applications => Manage Applications => Instagram. If you choose Clear data, your download cache will be cleared. Clear cache will reset the memory for the app. C\ Emails: For quick access, all the synced mail that you access through the app is stored on your iPhone. If you add all the attachments that you open on the iPhone, it pills up pretty fast. To clear out all mail cache and data, go to Settings => Mail, Contacts, Calendar, tap on the email account, delete the account and confirm, then re-add the account by tapping on Add New.

10

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How hard?    

an app to do all of this for you

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How efficient?    

The cool thing about it: You don’t do anything

Download Clean Master app. Now. This app will analyze and remove junk files, kill off buggy apps, manage the ones you installed, all to improve your mobile’s space and memory. The bonus? It will protect your personal information and manage antivirus as well. A must have!

W

u o t lim b a t a? ha

What is Lima? Lima is a little device that enables you to create your own personal Cloud in seconds. Just install it at home by plugging to your router and to an external hard drive. You can now access the content of your hard drive from any of your devices, wherever you are!

Sounds cool, but how does that help me with my storage problems? Because Lima enables you to expand your storage on all of your devices! Those 300 GB of pictures you have? Just put them on Lima! You’ll be able to enjoy them on all of your devices, but they won’t be taking place. Same for your music, videos, documents,... All of your files.

I have my graduation pics on my computer and smartphone, but they’re only taking space on my hard drive at home

How does it work? Lima makes all of your devices work together. On your devices, you see all of the files that are in Lima just like any regular files, except that they’re not necessarily stored there. They will be streamed from your Lima device when you need them. That way, you are released from the size limits of your devices. You can access terabytes of files & never abandon any of your files again!

How is that different from what the Cloud offers? • As opposed to the Cloud, Lima doesn’t need to take local storage on your computer. So you can really enjoy terabytes of files on a 256 GB computer without having to choose which one you want to sync. • Your files are stored at your own home and not on some companies servers. So you know... your pics remain private and can’t be be crawled by an algorithm or anything :)

Want to get rid of the storage problem fo-re-ver?

Build your personal Cloud with Lima