Monitor your drive space
Find how what happens when you run out of free space, and how to keep an eye on how much is left.
That low disk space warning we flagged in the introduction is unlikely to be the first indication you get that you’re running out of disk space. It’s not designed to appear until you have 200MB or less free disk space – a mere drop in the ocean these days. Instead, Windows’ first warning will likely appear when you open File Explorer to the ‘This PC’ view to see your drive’s usage is represented by a red bar rather than the regular blue one. This appears when your drive has less than 10% free space left, although the seriousness of the warning does depend on the size of the drive. For example, a 64GB drive with under 6GB left is more worrying than a 2TB drive with around 180GB free space still available.
MORE DRIVE ALERTS
Windows Update will also throw up an alert when it discovers there’s insufficient space to install the latest round of updates – this usually appears when you don’t have secondary storage attached to your PC for it to use as temporary file storage. It can pop up when there’s as much as 11GB still free on your drive for major feature updates, but of more concern is if it shows when you’re trying to install a cumulative update, which indicates your drive has less than 3GB left.
All computers make use of small recovery partitions (anywhere from 500MB for a basic Windows recovery partition to 8GB for a partition housing the files needed to reinstall Windows). Sometimes, these recovery partitions can be assigned drive letters in Windows – often in error. Because they’re designed to store specific files and not anything else, they can be filled almost to capacity, which results in Windows throwing up a low space disk warning.
The solution is simple: type ‘disk’
into the Search box and click ‘Create and format hard disk partitions’ to open Disk Management. Locate your Recovery partition in the list, then right-click it and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’. Click Remove followed by Yes at the warning and finally OK. Bingo, no more warnings for that drive.
MONITOR DISK USAGE
It’s all very well knowing that your free space is disappearing, but what’s taking up all that room? Your first stop on the quest for knowledge should be Windows’ own tools: navigate to Settings > System > Storage and after a short while, Windows will reveal what types of file are taking up the most space on your system drive. You’ll see categories for Apps & features and Temporary files, and you can click ‘Show more categories’ for a more precise listing of usage by categories as varied as Mail, Documents and Videos.
Click an entry in the list and you’ll be able to not just view more detail, but take remedial action: for example, if your Temp files are gobbling gigabytes of space, click this to manually clean them up – note, the Temp setting now covers files stored in your Downloads folder, although they are excluded by default. As you’ll see over the page, you should make use of Windows’ new Storage Sense feature to manage this automatically, removing temporary files as required to prevent your PC from running low on disk space.
Although Windows provides an ‘Other’ view to cover large folders, it’s not capable of easily highlighting those individual files and folders that are taking up the most space on your hard drive. To search for these requires a third-party tree-mapping tool. Treemapping tools provide a visual representation of each file on your hard drive(s) in the form of blocks, with the size of each block corresponding to the size of the file in question.
One such free tool is WinDirStat (https://windirstat.net/), which you can download and install from its parent website or add to your PortableApps toolkit for running on-demand. To add it to your toolkit, open the PortableApps platform and click ‘Apps > Get More Apps > By Category’ – you’ll find WinDirStat in the Utilities section. Once installed, right-click the program shortcut and choose ‘Run as administrator’ to allow it to check your entire drive, then check out the step-by-step guide to find out how to use it to both target and – if necessary – delete individual files. Check out the box for an alternative tool should WinDirStat’s somewhat garish user interface put you off.
Once you’ve determined where all your drive space has gone, you can move on to decide how to tackle the problem. Turn the page to find out how.
“You should make use of Windows’ new Storage Sense feature to remove temporary files automatically to prevent your PC from running low on disk space”.