Your C drive is running out of space for no reason, and you have no idea why?
In this article, I will show you how to fix this issue and free up disk space on your Windows 10 machine.
In Windows operating systems, including Windows 10 and the Windows Server editions, the C drive is considered the system drive.
It’s the drive where Windows keeps its system files (C:\Windows), the programs, the user’s profiles…etc.
The C drives keep growing over time with new programs and applications being installed, Windows updates, user adding personal documents, photos, videos …etc.
With all this ecosystem living in your C drive, you can wake up one day and find that you’ve only a few available disk space on your C drive!
How to fix that?
1. Free up disk space
The first action to perform is to free up disk space on the C drive by deleting temporary files and unnecessary files;
You can use ‘’Storage sense’’ a Windows 10 built-in tool to perform this task or a third-party tool like the well-known CCleaner tool.
Read this article for more details on how to use these tools to free up disk space on your Windows 10 computer.
2. Find the biggest folder
If, despite freeing up disk space on your computer, as suggested in the first step doesn’t solve your problem. And you notice that your C drive space keeps decreasing without any obvious reason, try to find this folder that keeps growing.
Windows Explorer can’t give you this information, and you need to use a third-party tool.
There are some great tools that are a great fit for this role, that are also free.
I can mention two of them;
Cases you can face:
Case 01: Windows Installer Directory
This example shows that the ‘’C:\Windows’’ folder is 76,8 Gb. And the largest subfolder is the Windows installer directory with 58,6 Gb in size.
Before rush in and delete all the Windows Installer directory content, you need to know that Windows used this directory to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files.
Windows uses these files during updating, patching, or uninstalling software.
But over time, as you install and uninstall software, patch, and patch your system again, these installer files become outdated and orphaned and can take up many gigabytes of data.
To safely remove the unneeded installer files, you can use the ‘’PatchCleaner’’ tool.
Case 02: System Volume Information
In this example the C:\System Volume Information is 79.3 Gb !
The ‘’System Volume Information’’ folder is a protected system folder that stores crucial information, including System restores points and Volume Shadow Copy;
If the System Volume Information is huge, follow these steps:
Click on Start and go to Settings > System > About > System info.
Click on ‘’System Protection’’
Select the C: drive then click on ‘’Configure’’;
- Start deleting the old restore points to free up disk space;
- Make sure that disk space allocated to store system restore points is reasonable;
This allocation will depend on your C: drive total size and the number of restore points you want to have.
For a volume of 250 Gb, allocating 4% (10 Gb) to system restore points is largely sufficient.
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