Windows 11 - Huge Amount of System Files

nheather

nheather

nheather

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Suddenly my 1TB (929GB) NVME C: Drive has become full. Last time I did any housekeeping was in October and it was running at about 50% and I haven't added anything significant since then, so really surprised to see execution errors and running out of disk space.

I checked my C: Drive folders and they amount to about 287GB.

So, I checked storage under settings and that shows that I suddenly have 631GB of System Files.

Any idea what the cause could be, or what I could do to resolve this.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
My approach would be:
Windirstat to see if you can get more info on what's using the space
Disk cleanup to see if you can clean it without having to bother with a clean install
Clean install to fix it otherwise
 
I like how WizTree visualises the disk usage. https://diskanalyzer.com/
ED209 said:
Have you tried running disk clean up? its built in to Windows.
Click to expand...
Yep, good start. Use Windows' own tools to clean up first. I also like going through the Apps page to remove anything there I don't want but then CCleaner (Portable) is good for helping me remove anything I can't find an uninstaller for.
 
UPDATE

This is very weird. I had tried many of the things that had been suggested above, but the drive was still showing pretty much full at 929GB. I'd tried shutting down and powering up but no difference. Then I tried a restart rather than a shutdown and when it came back up my disk was showing just 293GB used and 635GB free.

The crazy thing is that when I look at storage settings it shows

293GB used
635GB free

but still claiming

657GB as 'system and reserved'

But when I expand the 657GB 'system and reserved' it shows

29.7GB
1.01GB Virtual Memory
12.7GB Hibernation File
895MB System Restore

So according to MS maths logic, 29.7 + 1.01 + 12.7 = 657 !!!!

UPDATE - as I have been typing this, Windows has changed the 'system and reserved' to 45.4GB
 
Last edited:
There are bugs which will write a lot of data to network logging files, etc. in Windows but I can't remember the exact details off the top of my head.
 
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