Managing Low Disk Space
How To Free Disk Space

There are not many things which are less glamorous than managing a low disk space. However, disk space seems to be a commodity which is often in short supply and is important to know how you can free up disk space in order to keep your site running smoothly.

The most important thing about disk space is having enough of it. If your site is small, with just a few handful of pages or so, space shouldn't be a problem for you.

But as your website content and other data on your website increases (including pages, database content and so on), you may find yourself running low on free disk space

This matters for two reasons:

On computers, all information which is meant to be stored is kept on hard drives. Some information is temporary and is only kept in the memory. These are two entirely separate systems; though often conflated with each other. There are some side effects to running your site on a low disk space

Here's one way to visualize how this may affect your site...

Say that you had a table of a certain size and you begin laying out playing cards in the table. You lay them out in order at first – 2 next to 3 next to 4 and so on. However, you then pick up a few cards from the center and discard them – then add more cards. It won't be long before things start to look a little disorganized.

Now cover the cards with an opaque sheet of paper.

When displayed, you want the cards to appear in numerical order. Say you have a robot which can always draw the cards in an order form under the paper. This is analogous to how your operating system displays data to you in a way that makes sense; in reality, this data is usually stored randomly.

Why should you care about a low disk space?

Your files are broken up into pieces and stored all over the drive wherever your operating system finds some free disk space for them at the time you save or load your files. The more free space you have, the faster your system can find an appropriate space to store new pieces of information. This means that clearing junk off your drive not only frees up space and reduces clutter; it actually makes your system run faster!

But there's a second effect.

When you delete or change old files, these pieces are scattered ever more randomly throughout your hard drive. Remember from our illustration above, the "robot" takes longer to fetch and display the "cards" in the right order. Files are fetched and assembled as you request them, but the more scattered they are, the longer it takes to reassemble them.

This means that another important part of managing a low disk space is to keep your files in order, at least as much as possible. There is a utility to do this, known as a defragmentation program (or defragger) on your computer or server. You can run this yourself if you have the appropriate permissions, or ask your system administrator or your top host provider to do this. This utility keeps your files in order so that they can be accessed more quickly.

There are basically three important parts of managing a low disk space.

Keeping enough space free to store new data,
Keeping sufficient free space to facilitate quick storage of new files
Ensuring that information can be retrieved quickly by keeping your system orderly.

Of course when you only have a few files to deal with then this is not so important. However, as the number and size of your files grows, the effects of not keeping a handle on your disk space will become apparent. Organization will make a noticeable difference in the performance of your computer.

A lot of these tasks can be automated with various utilities. You can use utilities that will delete files which are older than a specified date in folders which you can also specify. You can set a defragmentation program to run automatically when your site is having less activities or in the background all the time.

You can talk to your system administrator and help them to do their job by keeping things tidy on your system to avoid running and operating under a low disk space and you'll have a web site which has better performance level. Read more about managing low disk space here.