You don't need to waste precious storage on your laptop keeping these kinds of things around-put them on an external drive or upload them to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or OneDrive. For example, I have gigabytes of work and tax documents that I rarely need to access but want to keep for a few years, and my wife has some projects from her grad school days she wants access to if she needs them. If you find files you aren't ready to get rid of yet, you might be able to move them somewhere else for safe keeping. Offload Files to External or Cloud Storage