10 Ways to Free up Disk Space Windows 10/11

These days, many users install Windows 10 on a solid-state drive (SSD). SSDs have a relatively small capacity compared to hard disk drives (HDD). After using Windows 10 for a while, you may face a low disk space problem.

Many things that you do not see are taking up your free space on the system drive, like Hibernation files, page files, system volume information, and Windows updates. If you do nothing, one day you will receive a Low Disk Space warning. There are 6 methods that you can do to free up or add more space to the Windows 10 system drive.

Delete Large File

The direct way to free up space from C: drive would be finding the large files and delete or move them to another location. Actually, the Windows File Explorer has this feature built-in. You can follow the steps below to see how it works.

Step 1. Open File Explorer and go to C: drive.

Step 2. Type “size:gigantic” in the search box at top right and press Enter to find files larger than 4GB.

Step 3. From the search results, delete or move the large files.

Note: Do not delete the file that you don’t know what it is to avoid system issues.

As you can see from the screenshot, you can also type “size:huge” to find files from 1GB to 4GB or “size:large” to find files from 128MB to 1GB.

Run Disk Cleanup in Windows 10

In Windows 10/8/7, you can use a built-in tool Disk Cleanup to delete various files including temporary Internet files, Recycle Bin, and even previous Windows installations. Windows upgrade program will save previous Windows installation files in the Windows.old folder.

1. To open Disk Cleanup, you can type “disk cleanup” in the search box or ask Cortana. You can also right click on C: drive and then select “Properties” and then select “Disk Cleanup” to cleanup C: drive in Windows 10.
2. In the Disk Cleanup window, just select a few items you want to delete and click “OK” and then it will start to delete these files. If you want to free up more space, click “Clean Up system files”.
3. Select the items that you want to delete and click OK.

When you get the Disk Cleanup in Windows 10, what to delete may concern you seeing all the listed items. When you attempt to delete system files, you should leave the “Windows ESD installation files”. The ESD file is used for Reset this PC, which is one of the recovery options in Windows 10 allowing you to keep or delete personal files and reinstall Windows. If you delete the ESD file, you will have 3GB more disk space but you will lose the Reset this PC option.

Furthermore, if you just finish a Windows update, it is recommended to save the Windows.old folder for a little while just in case some of the files were not transferred to the corresponding folder properly. When you are sure everything is in position, you certainly should delete Previous Windows installation to clean up Windows 10 space.

Scan your computer for unwanted software or virus

When you notice C: drive is full, you should first do a virus scan before wondering what you can delete. You should have good anti-virus software installed. At least, you should have Windows Defender and update to the latest version. Then you should start to run a clear scan. To protect your computer against viruses and malware, you should make sure your system is up to date.

Disable hibernate

Hibernate mode allows you to start your computer fast. Since many of you have installed Windows 10 on an SSD, which dramatically reduces the startup time, you probably do not need Hibernate mode. You can simply disable Hibernate mode and then delete the file.

The size of hiberfil.sys is about 3/4 of your installed Ram. If your computer RAM is 8GB, then you can free up about 6GB by deleting hibernate file. To disable Hibernate, you run the following command in an elevated command prompt:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Delete Page Files

The page files function as a physical extension of the RAM. When the physical RAM use is very high, Windows 10 shifts seldom or least utilized memory pages from the physical RAM to paging files or pagefile.sys. Another significant function is played by the pagefile.sys is to keep track of the state of Windows during a crash.
Windows 10 may not utilize the page file on systems with a lot of RAM since the physical RAM. If your computer has a lot of RAM, you can delete the pagefile.sys file for good to free up space on C: drive. You cannot delete the page files from File Explorer. Instead, you can follow the steps below to disable the feature.

Step 1. Right click on “This PC” and select “Properties”.

Step 2. Click “System Protection”.

Step 3. In the new System Protection window, click the “Advanced” tab and click “Settings” under “Performance”.

Step 4. In the Performace Option window, click the “Advanced” tab and click “Change” under “Virtual Memory”.

Step 5. In the Virtual Memory window, uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” and check “No paging file” for C: drive.

Storage Sense for Freeing up Space Automatically

You can also enable  Storage Sense to automatically free up disk space. From Storage Sense, you can also move files to from C: drive to another drive and change some files default saving location. Just follow the steps below to configure Storage Sense on a PC

1. Navigate to Settings > System > Storage.
2. Click on “Change how we free up space” to configure it.
3. There two options to free up space. You can toggle on one of them to set your preferences. If you want to run it now, click on the “Clean now” button.
4. After all the settings, don’t forget to turn on Storage Sense.

Reset Windows 10

If want to remove all the third-party software and games but keep all your personal files, you can reinstall Windows 10 without losing data. It will install a clean copy of the latest version of Windows 10 and remove apps that were installed on this PC.

Follow the steps below to get started:

1. Click on the Start button > Settings > the category for Update & security.
2. In the Update & security window, click on Recovery in the left panel. Then click on “Learn how to start fresh with a clean installation of Windows” under “More recovery options”.
3. Then it will bring you to a web page. Scroll down and click on Download tool now to install the Refresh Windows tool on your computer.
4. Open the tool to start refreshing. You will be asked whether you want to save personal files only or nothing.

OneDrive Files on-Demand

If you have OneDrive for desktop installed on your Windows 10 PC, it will take a lot of space to store all the files on OneDrive, especially OneDrive for Business.  Luckily, OneDrive allows you to enable Files on-Demand feature. If enabled, it will only download files to local as you use them. You can simply go to OneDrive Settings to check this option.

Free up space using NTFS compression

If all the above recommendations have not gotten you a considerable free space, you can compress files, folders, or an entire drive. This will free up lots of space but it will slow down stem performance, so use it as the last straw.

Setting up folder compression

1. Within File Explorer, locate the folder that you want to compress.
2. Right-click the folder and select the Properties option.
3. Click the Advanced button.
4. Check the Compress contents to save disk space option and click OK.
5. Then decide if you also want to compress subfolders and files option based on your situation and confirm the operation.

When you no longer need compression, you can always undo the changes using the same instructions.

Setting up drive compression

1. Within File Explorer, right click on C: drive from the left pane and select Properties.
2. Check the Compress this drive to save disk space option.
3. Then select if you also want to compress subfolders and files option and then click Apply to apply the compression to save space.

This will take some time depending on how many files stored there. Once it is done, you will at least see 15% of free disk space.  The exact space savings will depend on your drive and the files on it. If most of the files are already compressed, then not too much space can be saved.

Free up Space with Ashampoo

Ashampoo is a free software that can help you clean up your system and optimize your performance. It can scan your C drive and identify unnecessary files, such as temporary files, cache files, duplicate files, and more.

You can then choose to delete them or move them to another location. Ashampoo can also defragment your C drive, which can improve your access speed and reduce fragmentation. By using Ashampoo, you can free up space on your C drive and make your computer run faster and smoother.

Conclusion

That’s all the 10 methods that you can use to free up disk space in Windows 10/11. If you don’t want to do it yourself, then I recommend Ashampoo to clean up space for you. If you need to constantly free up space, it is probably a good time to extend your system drive or upgrade to a larger hard drive.