There’s a great feature in Windows 11 that can automatically clear out files you don’t need. It’s called Storage Sense. If you activate this feature Windows will clear out the temporary files you don’t need and automatically empty anything in the Recycle Bin that’s more than 30 days old. Let’s look at how to turn it on.
Open your Start Menu and type Storage Settings in the search box. Then click on the result.
The Storage menu will open.
Scroll down to Storage management and side that little button under Storage sense to the On position. You can customize how Storage sense works by clicking Change how we free up space automatically, just under the On/Off button.
Click on Storage Sense to customize your options. You can choose to automatically clean up temporary files and automatically clean your PC when storage space runs low.
It is automatically configured to run when space is low, but you can click the drop-down menu to change that.
Then choose between clearing up files daily, weekly, or monthly.
You can choose how your PC handles Temporary files.
You can also automatically delete files in your recycle bin if they’ve been there for a day, two weeks, one month, or two months.
Or decide to clear items from your Downloads folder after a certain period of time. Be careful with that setting. Make sure you’re vigilant about moving things you’ll need for later somewhere else.
You can set locally available cloud content to be online only if you haven’t accessed it for awhile and you can also choose to clean your PC right now.
Hi Cyn, I”m glad you said “be careful.” I haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 yet but don’t think I’d like this feature and hope there won’t be a default setting on it when I finally upgrade. Circumstances with files may change that require a person to adjust their settings and I think rather than be concerned about that, I’d rather create storage space manually.