Windows 10: Disk space reduced from 81GB to 30GB!

I was having about 81 GB free space in my system SSD, I wanted to gain more space so I right-clicked on the Recycle Bin icon and selected "Empty Recycle Bin". The Recycle Bin had about 7GB so I was expecting to gain that 7GB back, but instead, I lost over 50% of the storage I was having!!! It went from 81GB to 30GB in less than 10 seconds!!! What is going on and how is this even possible? How to retrieve my lost space?

:)

 

disk space reduced after media creation tool

Hi Sarah,

One of the possible reasons why your disk space was reduced is due to an unallocated disk space on your partitions. For us to isolate your concern, we suggest that you check your device's partition. To do this, follow the steps provided below:

• Type Computer Management on Ask me anything and press
  Enter.
• Select Storage and click on Disk Management.
• Send us a screenshot.

We look forward to your response.

 

Reduce disk size (Inspect SCSI )

Hi, I'm David an independent advisor and user just like you. I'll do my best to help you with this.

The answer is you have to reduce the size on BOTH sides.

Step 1) Within you virtual machine you need to go to Disk Management and reduce the size of the partition(s) on the drive you want to reduce - you want to end up with space left at the "end" of the virtual disk. This is the space you'll be able to recover.

Step 2) From your Hyper-V host you need to edit the virtual disk and use the Shrink option to reduce the size of the physical disk (as far as your VM is concerned it's a physical disk), and that would reduce the size of your virtual disk file on the host.

If you are increasing the size of the virtual disk then you do it the other way round - increase the size of the virtual disk on Hyper-V, then go to Disk Management inside your virtual machine and you'll find there's more space available to expand your virtual
volume.

Regards,

David

 

reduce windows disk space

I am due a windows update but it can't complete due to low disk space.

My C:\Windows folder takes up 31 GB of space and C:\Program Files\WindowsApps takes up 43 GB. C:\Recovery is already empty to try to cope with windows memory demands. I am loathed to continue with Windows. Yes, terabytes are becoming the norm but many people
like me have a ssd main drive with much more modest space and just these two folders alone take up more than half my disk space.

Thanks in advance for any advice on reducing windows disk space.