You can clean your drive one of two ways; you can go the manual path, meaning you select and delete items by hand, or there is software automation. The more user intensive manual process means examining by hand, the folders on the hard drive and choosing what files of the examined items are redundant, and deleting them depending on what you want to keep and want to delete. This procedure is much more thorough than automated methods but can be a burden. There are also automated programs that use information like the date files were last accessed, to automatically generate a collection of files and folders that must be deleted.

Such a variety of software tools can be found that interpret the matter of hard disk cleanup in ways that are different for each product. Various software products can be found now, that help users clean disk files easily and simply, and many of these also have other functionality too. But this is not all these products are capable of, for example some can delete private data, scan and remove inappropriate material, find unlicensed software installed on the computer, and free space analysis.