Windows 10: Mysterious files taking up large space in drive

Hi, I recently found out that one of my drives nearly ran out of storage. I was very surprised because I was very sure that I did not intentionally put many files in the drive. Windows11 tells me that there are 587GB of "Other" files first snapshot below, but when I clicked on it wanting to find out what actually is taking up that much space, the larges file shown is only 5.47GB see the second snapshot.How can I find out the "missing" 800GB+ files?

:)

 

Windows is taking up too much hard drive space.

Hi Trisha,

Windows might have been accumulated large drive space due to installed apps, temporary files, or etc. For us to identify which item mostly accumulates your drive space, we suggest that you check it here:

• Click on Start.
• Type Storage, and then press Enter.
• Under Local Storage, click on This
  PC (C.
• On this window, you will see which item mot accumulate your drive space.

We also recommend that you follow the steps given on this article on how to
free up drive space in Windows 10. Click on every drop down to view the steps.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Mysterious drive taking up space

Hi,

If the recovery drive takes too much size, most probably there are too many personal files or applications available on the system. Also, sometimes Windows update automatically stores the previous updates in it and takes a large amount of space on the disk.

You can use the free Treesize tool to determine which file and folder take too much size on the hard disk:

TreeSize Free | JAM Software

Free up drive space:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fre...

Feel free to ask if you have more questions.

Stay safe

____________________________________________________________

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Recovery Drive Mystery

Thank you Bree, the details you provided largely clears up the 'mystery' except that I am not aware that I opted not to backup system files (the default). The list of files amounting to around 4 GB is the sort of thing I was expecting. Plus, when you refer to the Boot etc. files taking only a few minutes to create, the time taken in my attempt to create the Recovery Drive was over an hour! (despite it being a clean, formatted drive). So it seems to me that some mysteries remain.

Anyway, I will now try again, and look out for the backup system files option to make sure it is on..