System Volume Information is where all your restore points are stored. Cleaning up restore points will release space.
System Protection Restore Points - Delete
You can limit the amount of space allowed for restore points if you are getting short on free space.
System Protection - Change Disk Space Usage
I get the disk cleanup tray popup when the free space is very low. However occasionally when it approaches zero, some form of automated disk cleanup apprently starts all by itself, it just flashes the usual dialog boxes quickly in a second or two and shows the usual message box with the amount of space freed. If you've ever seen that, I wonder if that's it.
Because it's convenient & saves time spent on getting programs running again and remembering what I was doing and where I was in each file last time. I'm the kind of person who has 2,000 tabs open in Pale Moon and I'm not very different with other software
Thanks, tho I actually didn't have any restore points, and checked that several times by trying to run System Restore in the last few days. However I still have 15% of the drive allocated to it so System Restore must be filling that space with something else (VSS?)
Trying to compile a list of all features that not only use up space but keep growing with time. Feel free to add anything I've missed / don't know of :)
Pagefile
- I'm guessing it can grow if you have it set on Automatically managed. I've fixed it at the same size as RAM and that's probably too much already for my purposes, the file was last modified 2 months ago
%TEMP%
- Fills up with old stuff regularly, and during software installs/updates
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files
- also not cleaned up automatically, not visible in Windows Explorer, cleaned up by the Cleanup wizard
%userprofile%\AppData\Local (not the Temp folder)
- many programs leave temporary files here too, old deletable setup files in various folders could up to a gigabyte on a never cleaned system. However not all setup files are deletable, some are still needed by their programs
Search indexer
- Eats up the whole disk if not turned off and still useless. I've only figured out one way to turn it off and save space: Control Panel > Indexing Options. First go to Advanced > Rebuild indexing, then wait until indexing restarts (if you didn't do anything else, takes a few min) and quickly press Pause. This "pauses" it for 15 minutes. Then go to Services and stop and disable Windows Search.
C:\Windows\Installer
- Seems to be old setup exes and msis/msps for some programs and probably all Win updates. These might be the things that get called when you go to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and select one with Change/Repair ??
- Old files are not deleted, for example I've found msi's for dozens of Adobe Reader updates and I don't have Adobe Reader any more. WICleanup will delete the orphaned setup files. Found 15GB of crap
C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download
- Windows Update bloat
C:\Windows\Temp
- not used much, found only 50MB of old log files
C:\System Volume Information
- contains restore points
- maybe also contains other things like VSS (which I think is handled by System Restore). I'm now wondering if System Restore can also make some hidden restore points, since the amount that went missing after the last install and ended up in SVI was almost exactly 2x the size of installed files in Program Files.
Thumbnails
- can use up gigabytes if you have many pictures, cleaned up in the Cleanup wizard
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\ThumbCacheToDelete
- not sure what this is, several hundred MB of .tmp files dating back to after the last PC restart. Wasn't able to delete in Windows Explorer
Didn't have any of these, but they show up in torchwood/Roy's utility (thanks!)
- Flash cache
- %systemdrive% (C:\) .tmp files
- %systemroot% (C:\Windows) .tmp files
- %systemroot%\System32 .tmp files
- %systemroot%\System32 (64bit) .tmp files
- %systemroot%\System32\drivers .tmp files
Internet history
- Could be a problem in IE. In Pale Moon adds up to several dozen MB even after years and years of browsing with normal history pruning completely disabled via hidden preference.
- However I use a session manager to backup sessions and that adds to several GB. I've curbed that growth by deleting old sessions
- In PM preferences I've limited cache to 0 KB, previously it was also wasting space
C:\ProgramData
- I've deleted things from here in the past but don't remember the details
- 1 GB used by "Microsoft Antimalware" and "Windows Defender" folders. I use none of this stuff. Haven't tried deleting yet
C:\MsoCache
- MS Office setup crud. Somebody on the internet said you can burn it to a DVD and change its references in registry from C:\MsoCache to X:\MsoCache (where X: is your optical drive) and then delete it. Haven't tried yet.
C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CrashDumps
- Presumably the dumps cleaned up by the Cleanup wizard. I have some dumps in here.
C:\Windows\winSxS
- False alarm despite some website claims. Looks to be all hardlinks, so deleting this would save no space at all.
Too much effort to gain less than a G byte.
Why don't you buy a small SSD (120G - US$25) for windows and programs and use the HDD for data only?
What do you mean less than a gigabyte? I've listed over 20GB of useless files. That's already probably enough free space to last me the rest of this OS lifespan, as long as I can make sure it won't get quickly filled up with some process I missed.
If I had enough free space for full System Restore usage and search indexing, it would be easily 100GB or more. I have a 500GB C: partition and for nearly all of this installation's lifetime it's been stuffed, with Windows silently freeing up several hundred MB here or there as I added more stuff on it, or me moving data to another partition to install new programs. Less than 200GB of data remains.
It's well known that Windows expands to eventually consume all free space on C:, I think if I put it on a 1TB partition it would still eat everything in less than a month if I didn't disable at least Restore & indexing
BrainDamage,
I don't know of anyone who uses a computer with so many programs/tabs of whatever constantly open & doesn't regularly shut down or restart their computer.
My opinion, that is problematic!
Nor do I know anyone who is experiencing the issues you claim (including me). Maybe your problem is being created by how you USE your system?
Again my opinion.
@Snick well if I used it less, maybe I wouldn't have some of these problems. But that's not really much of a solution
And anyway I don't really care that much, you might not believe it but everything works fine if there's more than 50MB free space, that thing about min 10% free is a total myth. The only issue I have is maintaining 50MB free. It takes 2 seconds to move a file that size to another disk where I have TBs free every now and then, and that's all I want to avoid doing
It looks like the trial version of the TreeSize software you recommended can save sizes of all the folders so I'm gonna run that, free up some space and if anything eats it after a week or two I'll know what it was and post here
I have a small SSD (128G) with Win 7 and Linux. The Windows partition is 83G and it has 28G free.
Using Kari tutorial I have moved C:\users (SSD) to D:\Users (HDD)
As you didn't fill up your hardware specs on your profile, we don't know how big is your C: partition.
Anyway, you're loosing a lot of time just to avoid buying another drive.
If you want to gain some G bytes:
- Disable System Restore.
- Move the virtual memory to another disk
- Disable hibernation (“powercfg.exe -h off” [make sure you are an Administrator])
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