Out Of Space? WTF!

My laptop has been nagging me the last few days. A persistent pop-up bar insists I'm running out of space on this thing and I need to clear stuff out. 

My first thought was I've accumulated too much in my photos library. Deleted stuff gets held for 30 days in case I should ever come to my senses and rescue all those imperfect treasures. Not sure how that made sense, since when I combined pics from an old laptop with the current ones well over a year ago, there were 15,000 or so until I started getting brutal with my decisions. No nagging pop ups back then. It's an enormous temptation to keep absolutely everything, since they all mean something to me. But I know better. After this summer's vacation I put off scouring out the new crop of duds, so it was time to dig in. Somehow, the more I did that, the more often that pop-up nagged me. 

Wasn't I doing it right?

I decided to focus on the videos. Most are pretty awful, badly in need of editing and major cutting. None were recorded using a tripod, so wiggle wiggle bounce, leave the subject and return  - kinda, and so on. I played them and saved a couple from each set of several. The baby pictures were hardest, since they are all precious. But their mom has copies and can do what she likes on her end. I'll settle for the best of the best, so I got rid of a bunch of those.  Not done yet, but I'm down a couple thousand, pics plus videos.

You'd think that would make a big difference, wouldn't you? The pop up still popped up regularly. I repeated my search for a way to eliminate deleted photos sooner than 30 days, but no go. Pop! Pop! Getting desperate here folks. How can I continue to delete what I think are the problem if I run out of room to do it in?

I went into the files I keep in folders on my laptop. The primary use is keeping club minutes, but the latest club treasurer has the skills to take my emailed pdf files and save them on the club computer. No more overflowing filing cabinet for the club, no sir! I got rid of all but the most recent.

Still getting the pop ups.

Finally a light bulb went on in my brain. How long does my email keep old stuff? I know I clear out trash periodically. A quick check showed a few hundred since last purge. Tap tap. Gone. Hmmm, spam too? Now gone as well.

But how many drafts still sat in their folder?  Oops, just a few, not the problem. One desperately needed to be sent and I hadn't noticed it wasn't. Also gone now. 

I'd just gone in and cleared out my inbox, at least the stuff I didn't still need since the oven was installed, the insurance company sent the check, and a bunch of conversation threads were no longer needed. The inbox alone took about 15 minutes to clear out, but that was just last week and I was still getting pop ups.

I re-cleared the trash folder. Still not the problem. What else? Wait, how about the "sent" folder? I tend to send out pictures to a bunch of people at a time, and comments come back attached to what I sent out, meaning those same pictures are coming back, adding to the pile with each comment. I try to start new threads, but even those can turn into lengthy conversations, particularly with a few of my friends who need somebody to "hear" them. How many "sent" emails were backed up? I can't recall ever emptying that folder.

With each conversation counting as one, no matter how much back and forth there was, I started deleting those. My fingers got tired, so to pause I went over to trash and recleared it. 378 conversations, now down the drain. I was still in 2021. Keep going. After doing the same until my fingers needed a break, I was back to 2019, and another seven hundred something conversations gone. I forget now - already! - how far back in the calendar I went, but I figured out by the time the last "sent"conversation got thoroughly deleted, I'd hit that set of buttons around three thousand times!

Good thing I know just where the ibuprofin is kept. No pain typing this, anyway.

So now I just need to see if that pop up is still popping. If that didn't do it, I don't know what will. But you can be damn sure that my email folders will get regular scrubbing - except for the ones I archived, of course.