How to find what’s eating your Windows storage [2026]

Windows already knows where your disk space went. It just buries the answer three menus deep, and half the categories it shows you are useless.

That’s the frustrating part. The Storage panel will tell you that 84 GB sits under “Other,” then dump you into File Explorer and wish you luck. So the method below starts with what Windows does well, then hands off to a free tool that does the rest properly.

The order matters. Go after the biggest offenders first and you’ll clear real room in 10 minutes. Start randomly opening folders and you’ll spend an hour deleting things that saved you 200 MB.

Start where Windows counts the bytes for you

Press Win + I to open Settings, then head to System > Storage. You get the total space in use on your main disk and a breakdown of what’s claiming it. Click any category and Windows drops you into the right place to deal with it.

Installed apps is usually near the top of that list. Clicking it takes you to Settings > Apps > Installed apps, and the first thing you should do there is change the Sort by box to Size (Large to Small). That single change turns a wall of names into a ranked hit list.

Hit the three-dot (…) menu next to anything you’ve stopped using and choose Uninstall. If you’ve got at least two drives, some programs offer a Move option instead, including games from the Microsoft Store. Moving beats deleting when you might come back to it.

The cleanup checkboxes that can bite you

Temporary Files gives you a set of checkboxes for things like Thumbnails. Easy wins, no consequences. Click Cleanup System Files to reveal more categories of clutter.

But be careful with Downloads and the Recycle Bin. Both can be holding a lot of space, and both can be holding something you actually want.

Open the Recycle Bin from your desktop and scan it before you empty it, because clearing the bin permanently deletes what’s inside. Same logic applies to Downloads, where people tend to leave installers, invoices and one-off files they never moved anywhere else.

Running more than one drive? Back on the Storage page, expand Advanced storage settings and choose Storage used on other drives to get the identical breakdown for the rest of them.

System and reserved: last resort, not first

The System & reserved section shows how much space Windows features are consuming. You may need to click Show more categories to see it at all.

Treat this as the final stop. Disabling these things removes real functionality. That said, the space is reclaimable if you’re desperate.

If you never use hibernation, you can drop the large hiberfil.sys file entirely. Type “cmd” into the Start menu, right-click the Command Prompt entry and choose Run as administrator, then enter powercfg /hibernate off and press Enter. Changed your mind later? powercfg /hibernate on puts it back.

System restore is the other lever. It sends your PC “back in time” to undo a bad update or an unwanted change, which is worth keeping in most cases. Click Manage system restore, select your System drive in the Control Panel window that opens, choose Configure, and drag the Max Usage slider down if you’re fine with fewer restore points. Delete wipes all of them, which is a real chunk of space and a real loss of safety net.

Where the Settings panel gives up

The Storage menu is a decent start and a poor finish. Categories like Music and Videos just open File Explorer locations, and Other, which is where Windows files anything it can’t classify, does the same. You learn nothing about individual files.

That’s the gap third-party tools fill by drawing folder sizes as a hierarchy you can actually walk through. My favorite is TreeSize Free.

Use the button on the top toolbar to run it as an admin, otherwise it’ll skip folders it can’t read. Then click Select Directory and point it at your entire C: drive.

The largest folders sort to the top, and the arrows let you expand and drill down. Program Files and Program Files (x86) are usually enormous, since that’s where installed apps live. Don’t delete anything in there directly. Uninstall through Settings as described above.

Look for your account under Users to work out which personal files should move to another drive or go entirely. If AppData is showing many gigabytes, that’s cache and downloaded content from browsers, streaming platforms and email clients, and clearing it is usually safe. Right-click any folder and choose Open to jump to it in File Explorer.

dupeGuru is worth adding to the kit too. It hunts down copies of files scattered across your system, which is the one kind of waste TreeSize won’t flag.

Now go after what you found

What you do next depends entirely on what the scan turned up. Steam games you haven’t launched in a year? Open the client and uninstall them. Large files you’re finished with? Delete them, then empty the Recycle Bin once you’ve pulled back anything you still want.

For files you want to keep but can’t house locally, move them off the machine. Upload long videos to YouTube and delete the local copy. Sync photos to something like Google Photos, then remove what’s on disk. OneDrive can be set to keep only cloud copies of files you haven’t touched in a while.

One caveat that matters more than the space you save: keep multiple copies of anything important. A single cloud copy isn’t a backup.

Buy a drive before you delete something you’ll miss

If you’re constantly scraping by, a second drive is money well spent. External SSDs add a terabyte or more, which is enough to stop rationing your own files.

External HDDs are slower but perfectly good for data you rarely touch, and they cost less, which counts for a lot given the extreme prices of storage right now. Even a few flash drives will take some pressure off.

Set it and stop thinking about it

Go back to Settings > System > Storage and click Storage Sense. It clears junk on a schedule without you doing anything.

Enable Keep Windows running smoothly… to strip temp files regularly, then turn on Automatic User content cleanup. You can have it run only when storage gets low, or at set intervals.

Set the Recycle Bin and Downloads options carefully here, because this is exactly where people lose data they meant to keep. The fix is a habit, not a setting: as part of organizing your PC, put only files you don’t need long-term in Downloads. Then the automatic cleanup never costs you anything.