In Google Drive, you can edit or update a document and still manage to recover its previous versions. It also doesn’t matter if your file wasn’t saved or uploaded in a Google format because you can still view and manage its versions. The thing is keeping the previous versions of your files can take up space. So if you want to free up some space in your cloud storage, you can choose to enable the option for automatic deletion of file versions. Just skip past the break to learn how.

How to enable automatic deletion of file versions in Google Drive

• Using any web browser (preferably Chrome or Firefox), open your Google Drive account.
• Once you’re on Google Drive, select any file or document that isn’t saved in a Google format. You’ll be able to recognize these files by their icons.
• Right-click on your selected file then on the drop-down menu, select “Manage Revisions”.

• A pop-up dialog will appear and it will display all of your file’s previous versions/revisions.
• As you can notice, the file sizes for your previous file revisions has already been summed up and added to the file size of your current revision. Therefore, your files will be taking up more space than the rest of your files without revisions.

• To decrease the storage usage, just uncheck the previous file revisions that you no longer want to store in Google Drive.

Just keep in mind that even if you’ve already unchecked your files, they won’t be automatically deleted from your Google Drive. The older versions of your files will remain in your previous revisions list for 30 days or at least until you reach the limit of 100 revisions. After reaching this limit, the files will be automatically deleted from your cloud storage account.

The good thing about this option is that you can select specific file versions that you wish to keep while automatically deleting the rest that you consider as insignificant.