You can clean your drive one of two ways; the first simply involves manually reviewing files and folders for deletion, but remember there is the automatic method which can put technology to work for you. The more user intensive manual process means examining by hand, the folders on the hard drive then coming up with a list of which data files can go, and deleting them as required. Because you examine each file manually the risks are less than techniques involving automated software tools but this way can be tedious if many files exist. You can use software cleanup products that make use of system dates like the date files were last accessed, and use this information to build a table of files and folders which are then cleaned off the disk automatically.

There are many drive cleaners that can approach 'hard disk cleaning' from a different point-of-view. Many good tools exists that allow you to scan computers almost all of which feature additional cleaning capabilities. However there are more things that software can do, many can also delete private data, check the drive for porn and remove it, find programs that are not properly licensed, and show the distribution of data on your HDD.

Many software products are available on the internet to help with drive cleaning, and these exist in several main forms. The most popular seem to be cleanup software products such as the 'Disk Cleanup' utility that comes with Microsoft operating systems, that are used to get rid of useless files and folders and give back usable space in the process. There are 'PC privacy' tools that clean out URL history and clean up lists of URLs typed from IE and Firefox, and some other browsers, such as evidence removal cleaners. Also common is the porn detector software, that can pick up on the exact source of pornography style images and movies and a range of other inappropriate files and allows deletion of these items. The last category of drive cleaning tools consists of forensic style software which can overwrite with 1s and 0s, random data from anywhere on the disk so its gone permanently.