Free up Drive Space in Windows

Although the storage capacity of hard drives is expanding each year, files are also getting larger. High-definition movies, lossless music files and photo-realistic games quickly and quietly eat up the drive space. If your PC is running low on storage, here are some tips for you to free up some space.

1. Run Disk Cleanup Tool

Disk Cleanup is a Windows built-in tool designed to delete unwanted temporary files and junks.

You can find it under Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. Then you could select a volume to clean. The other way to access Disk Cleanup is to right-click the drive you wish to clean in File Explorer, select Properties, and click the Disk Cleanup button under General tab.

After the tool finishes the scanning, you will see a list of options that could be cleaned, including cached Web pages, temporary application files, reports from Windows Error Reporting, Recycle Bin files and so on. If you updated your system from an older version of Windows, you will see a folder called Windows.old that is taking up a considerable amount of space.

Windows.old is not something new that comes with the free Windows 10 upgrade. Starting with Vista, when you "upgrade install" (upgrade from one version of Windows to another with a new copy of Windows), a windows.old folder will be created. The Windows.old folder contains all the files and data from your previous Windows installation, like Windows system files, installed program settings and different users accounts' files. It is a backup file in case you want to revert to the old version, or you find something missing and you want to do some digging around. 

Select the types of files you want to delete and click OK. You can go ahead and delete the Windows.old without any problem as long as you don't want to downgrade and you have every important file you need from the old version.

2. Clear Application Cache Files

Windows Disk Cleanup cleans junks and temp files created by Windows operating system, but it doesn’t affect temporary files used by other programs. Various web browsers create a lot of cache files to reduce Internet access time; various 3D design or video editing software can generate gigabytes of preview files to reduce the staggering when you preview your works. 

For example, in Chrome, click the More icon in the upper-right corner, On your browser toolbar, click More icon (three dots). Select More tools, and then click Clear browsing data. In the "Clear browsing data" box, click the checkboxes for different options. Click Clear browsing data to clear all the caches.

Before you clear application caches, you should know that deleting these files will potentially affect the efficiency when you access files and these caches will continue to be created as you use these applications.

3. Reduce the Recycle Bin size

Recycle Bin is a virtual folder that stores the information of files deleted in Window Explorer by users. It doesn't have a path or a fixed capacity. The capacity of the Recycle Bin is determined by each underlying volume size.
In Windows operating systems with NTFS filesystem, each volume has a $Recycle.Bin folder under it, which normally is set to Hidden. The capacity of Recycle Bin is the total size of each $Recycle.Bin combined. The calculation might vary in different versions of Windows but start with Windows Vista, the algorithm for default $Recycle.Bin size is ten percent of the first 40GB of volume size/quota, and five percent of any remaining volume/quota above 40GB. You can manually set the capacity of each recycle bin.

Right-click on the Recycle Bin icon and select Properties. Select the Recycle Bin Location for the drive you wish to change the Maximum size for. Select Custom Size and set the Maximum size in MB for storage you want. Click on Apply. Repeat the above steps to change the recycle bin size on other volumes.
When you finished tweaking the values, click OK to leave.

4. Reduce the Maximum Space Used for System Protection

System protection regularly creates information about system files. It can also keep copies fo system settings and previous versions of files. You can reduce the amount of hard disk space allocated to System Restore. By doing so, you will have fewer restore points available as older points will be replaced by new ones more frequently.

When you are freeing up drive space, you could sometimes inadvertently delete files you still need. When this happens, act quickly to prepare for data recovery and stop putting new files into your hard drive. The chance of a successful data recovery is very high when you act quickly and select a proper tool.