Will deleting history free up space?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #90 I look at the amount of disk space that can be retrieved
from deleting various types of history.

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Deleting history to free up space

Well, it depends on exactly what history you mean.

• There’s your document history;

• Your browser history;

• Your form history.

There’s any number of different kinds of history that are kept on your computer.

There are also histories that are kept elsewhere. Like, your search history might be kept by Google if you’re logged into a Google account and so forth and so on.

So, I can’t really say how to delete your history because it depends very specifically on what history you’re talking about, and what programs might be involved in maintaining that history.

Not much disk space

What I can say is that, no. When you delete history, you’re not really deleting any appreciable amount of data. The amount of data that history is kept in is typically very, very small.

Yes, you’ll free up some; you might free up a megabyte or so.

It depends on, again, which programs we’re talking about and what kind of history we’re talking about. But, typically, we’re talking about very small amounts of data in comparison to things like the size of your hard drive.

So if you’re looking to free up space, deleting your history is not something that’s going to help in any significant manner.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)