How to see what folders are taking up space windows 10

Although disk drives have grown in size, so have our files and there never seems to be enough space. Finding out what is using the most space is an easy task in the Windows 10 Settings app.

Old style mechanical disk drives are big and cheap, but many people still have problems with storage space because the size of digital media like photos, videos and music is also growing.

Some games are also very large and some can require several gigabytes of storage space. In fact, some need over 20GB of space. Even a large disk drive can find itself short of space after a year or two’s use.

If you are lucky enough to have a solid state drive (SSD), you will be well aware of storage problems. Drives are much smaller than mechanical disks and may be just a couple of hundred GB. The storage space is easily used up.

Related: How to save disk space with Files On Demand

What is using the most disk space?

You may not have realised it but Windows 10 can answer this question. At one time a third party utility was required, and one will be looked at shortly, but there is a tool built into Windows that can tell you what is using the most space.

• Press Windows+I to open the Settings app
• Click System and then select Storage on the left

You have probably seen this before, but you may not have realised that the disk usage bars on the right can be clicked. Go ahead and click the C: drive.

The disk space usage is displayed in categories like Other, System & reserved, Videos, Apps & games, Pictures, OneDrive, Music, Temporary files and so on. You may be shocked to see how much some categories are using.

Each of these items can be clicked and some of them show more details. For example, click System & reserved and it shows how much space Windows is using and what for. Most items cannot be changed, but there is a button to manage the space used by system restore.

Click Temporary files on the Storage usage screen and there is a long list of items like log files, error files, user file history, thumbnails of images and many more. The list goes on. Many of these items used to be in the old Windows Disk Clean-up utility, but now you can clean up from within the Settings app.

Tick the boxes against any items you don’t want and click the Remove files button to delete them to recover the disk space. All of these temporary files are safe to delete, but check each one because the items in the list can change from version to version of Windows 10. You might want to keep the items in the Recycle Bin (deleted files) for example.

Click the Other category in the disk usage list to see what else is using all the disk space. It lists the biggest folders on the disk no matter where they are. Here you can see that a lot of space is used by VirtualBox virtual machines, Desktop, Documents, Google Drive, and so on.

If any of these items are clicked, they open an Explorer window to show the contents of the folders. After there any folders or files you can delete?

See disk space usage in TreeSize Free

TreeSize Free is a useful utility that goes further than Windows Settings and it enables you to see which folders are using the most disk space.

Using it is straightforward and clicking the first icon in the toolbar, Select Directory, enables you to choose the disk to analyse. Choose the Windows (C:) drive. Treesize begins scanning the disk, counting the number of files and adding up their sizes.

It takes some time to complete, so wait till it has finished.

Click any column heading to sort the results. For example, click Size to sort the folders with the largest at the top. Folders can be expanded to see subfolders and these can be expanded too.

Keep on drilling down until you find out which folders are using the most space. Whether there are any files that can be deleted is a different matter and you may find that you need the files. Video clips, games, photos, music and so on, are all valuable and you may not want to delete them.

I found several large folders I didn’t realise were taking up so much disk space. I will certainly be taking a close look at them in Explorer and seeing if they can be cleaned up.

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