In order to keep existing data intact, we can use the Wipe free space function in Data Wiper instead of the Wipe entire disk one. Wipe external hard drive to prevent data recovery The common need of searching the phrase clean up external drive is to wipe deleted data clean, which will be discussed in the next paragraph. So using the same methods of cleaning up internal drive to free up space on external drives doesn’t make any sense, a simple deletion on files would be quick and good enough to free up space. Uninstall apps and games you don’t needĪnd If you’re using Windows 10, the new updates provide a function called “Storage sense”, which is able to automatically free up space by getting rid of files you don’t need, like temporary files and content in your recycle bin, but as for external hard drives, we normally don’t store junk files, or set it as a default download path for browsers, the device is portable and is used for keeping personal and private files, so we can just delete those files we don’t need anymore, or just migrate them to internal drives when we want to free up space on the drive.Remove temporary files using Disk Cleanup.Normally, we can do many things to free up disk space on the internal drives, operations below can be sufficient: Clean up external hard drive to free up space There are mainly two ways to clean up external hard drive without formatting: one is to use the Clean up disk option in Windows to free up disk space, another is to wipe free space of the external hard drive to prevent recovery of previously deleted data (the wipe free space function won’t affect the existing data, so we don’t have to format the external hard to make data clean).

Wipe external hard drive to prevent data recovery.Clean up external hard drive to free up space.

Hard drive reformatting