How do I make space on my system drive?

Newmaven · 17 Jan 2016

I have a 1 TB system drive and several data drives. At the moment, 850 GB of C:/ is in use, and I think much of what's there should be gone or elsewhere.

For instance, 274 GB is Windows.old, even though my Win 7 was a clean install onto a brand new drive. At least some of that is content duplicated on other drives. (I note that one of my poems is in my data drive but also in windows.old\isers\me\documents\files and in c:\users\me\appData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent and in C:\users\me\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office\Recent. There are also some photos on C:\

What can I safely delete? What can I move to my data drives, and how do I move it?

The attached pdf gives a breakdown of the drive's contents.

whs · 17 Jan 2016

How do I remove the Windows.old folder?

AddRAM · 17 Jan 2016

You should copy and paste your data to your data drives, that`s what they are for, then reinstall windows :)

You should not be saving any data on C, if you create something, or download something and say hey, I want to keep that, copy it to your data drive, verify it`s there, then delete it from C.

Callender · 17 Jan 2016

Also for a start your System Volume Information directory is 469Gb.

Here's mine:

How do I make space on my system drive?-svi.jpg

So clear saved "system restore points" and check how long they are kept before being deleted. Check how much space is assigned to system restore points.

Start> Run

then type sysdm.cpl

Press Enter

On the System Protection tab choose drive C then configure.

Edit: Info on TTL registry setting (time to keep restore points)

System Restore Points Saved for Only One Month?

Forget the software mentioned unless you really need it. You can pretty much do the same manually.

Layback Bear · 17 Jan 2016

Disable hibernation will save "C" partition space.

Here is a insert from on of Brinks tutorial.

If you do not hibernate your computer, then you could disable hibernation and delete the hiberfil.sys file to save the space it allocates on your system hard drive (Windows 7 drive).

By default, the size of the hiberfil.sys file will be the same as the amount of installed RAM on your computer.

Newmaven · 18 Jan 2016

AddRam: What data can and can't I move to my data drives? And if I then reinstall, won't the reinstalled system point to the same old locations and put more data there? I think what I need is a way to move the data and tell the system to use my data drives for that hereafter.