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I like to keep my systems drive neat and uncluttered, partly because I take an image of the drive from time to time as a backup. (I don't use System Restore.) In order to achieve this:
1. I keep my data on a separate internal drive (D:\).
2. I redirect temporary files to a folder on the data drive.
3. I don't use System Restore. It is not 100% reliable and the shadow copies take too much space.
4. Hibernation is turned off. In my case it is unnecessary and takes up too much disk space.
5. I run Ccleaner on a daily basis to get rid of cookies and other junk left behind by Edge.
6. I run Disk Cleanup regularly on the systems drive.
7. Whenever there is an update on Windows, I get rid of the files from the previous version on the systems drive.
And yet:
I like to do a new clean install of Windows and all apps about once a year. I did one three days ago. I cleaned the systems disk, repartitioned it and installed Windows 10 version 1909 - the same version that was running just before the clean install. I installed the exact same applications that I had running previously. When all was done and everything restored to the same state as previously, the systems drive had 24 GB more free space than it did before the clean install.
I have noticed before that disk space is slowly eroded over time for no apparent reason. What is eating the free disk space? 
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Leprechauns. Since Millennials never look up from their mobiles, no-one is chasing rainbows to get their pots of gold - so they have been retrained as byte eaters. Individually they don't eat much, but as the breed inside your SSD the group consumes more and more. Think yourself lucky you don't have Banshees - they eat used space as well as free.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Quote: they have been retrained as byte eaters
Surely you meant to write "byte biters." 
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Strange. My aging Win7 installation never gets far beyond using 10& of my disk space. That might be because I have no apps. Get rid of them, it may free up s lot of space.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: 10& of my disk space
So how many bytes are there in an &?
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1.21 gigabytes. Or it was a typo.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Check %Temp% there will be a lot there. Feel free to shift-delete them all.
They'll make more.
\Windows\Software Distribution - where MS caches update files
\Windows\Prefetch - Again, Feel free to shift-delete them all.
They'll make more.
Then there is the Temporary Internet Files Cache - Browser Specific location
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Useful info. Thanks! 
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Ron Anders wrote: Then there is the Temporary Internet Files Cache - Browser Specific location
Noticed browsers (all of them) have more then 1 cache, some that don't clean even if you set the "clear cache on exit" option(s) - and yes, a lot of old & redundant crap therein.
not forgetting winduds has a system TEMP and user TEMP, as well as a few more caches hidden in AppData and ProgramData, every single problem report (sent or not), old windud updates, latest updates, a bunch of other installers that never seem to be purged, log files kept forever, ...
stuff hidden everywhere (wasn't AppData/ProgramData meant to be for settings, not caches, logs and run-time data?)
a lot of those folders I junction/link to the TEMP - makes cleaning up easy.
(even better on linux etc, link those directories to /tmp - auto purged every reboot.)
Message Signature
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Thanks for the tip! 
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Ron Anders wrote: \Windows\Prefetch - Again, Feel free to shift-delete them all.
well that's weird, I find that folder but I can't open it.
No message no nothing, doubleclick / entering on it does nothing at all.
(and Yes I'm an admin on this pc)
Tom
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Hmmm.... Never saw that action before.
Maybe the ntfs index is in disrepair. idk
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Think it's some sort off permission problem. It is in a company domain.
Still strange I don't get a message telling me I have no permissions tho.
A colleague does get a message stating that ...
Ah well not important :p
Tom
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Strange! I have bo issue accessing that folder.
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Cp-Coder wrote: I have noticed before that disk space is slowly eroded over time for no apparent reason. What is eating the free disk space?
Some programs insist on cluttering your C with temp downloads and log files; search the "ProgramData" folder in the root - my WinPC is 3 months now, and already it has 5Gb there. One of the offending ProgramData subfolders is "PackageCache" (1.7 Gb) and there's NVIDIA taking 1.87Gb in their private "downloader" folder there.
There's another downloadfolder on "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download" which has a few MB in it. If your machine was older, there's some minidumps you might want to get rid of, but I don't think there's a lot of them on a fresh machine.
Makes me wonder though how much download-folders are present on the drive 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Thanks!
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You're welcome
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Makes me wonder though how much download-folders are present on the drive
At least one for every self-updating program you have installed. 
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It is coming from the uninstall files of the windows updates. Every time a patch is installed by windows update, uninstall files are kept in the windows directory - that's how the patch can be removed if via the windows update menu. With a clean windows install, these are gone, since all the patches are integrated into that newer version of windows directly.
My former PC was old enough to contain several major updates of win7. After cleaning the windows directory containing these uninstall, I could free about 200Gb, which was almost 50% of my disk space. With the drawback of not being able to uninstall old windows update kbs anymore, but who needs that ?
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If you look at the properties of your system drive and select Disk Cleanup / Clean up system files, you get the option to remove the old files left over by the updates. I do this after every major update.
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Why don'T you just take an image of the clean full installed system once done?
AOMEI or Macrium would do the job.
OriginalGriff likes AOMEI, I personally like the Macrium CD more.
I know Hirens is back for Win 10 in a DVD, didn't chekc it yet though.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Macrium is my flavor of choice too. The image is already done!
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We used to do that at work, frequently restoring a clean machine. This was essentially for the software test setups: We wanted tests to be run in a controlled environment.
It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all. If you install a six month old image, you have to rerun all the same updates as you did when installing the image the week before, and two weeks before, collected over the six months, plus those of last week. It might take an hour or two running the updates.
I think this must have bothered a lot of users. MS did tune up its update procedures to speed up things. This was a few years ago.
We couldn't wait for the update processing (maybe several times a week). So we made an cleanup script to do all the things mentioned here: Clean up all temp directories (including personal ones in \users\<username>\AppData\Local for all users), the \users\<username>\AppData\pip directory (if you are using Python software), any .log, .temp or .tmp file, uninstall files, browser caches, and a number of locations particular to the tools we are using. Nowadays we are introducing Docker, and if your users are not well behaved and forget to include the -rm option when they run a container, you'll soon have a big pile of stale containers that must be cleaned out by a 'docker system prune'.
To catch the big disk space thiefs, I would recommend TreeSize Free[^] (there is a fancy 'pro' pay version as well, but the free version will do the job). It may run as Administrator, to map space usage in directories you cannot access as a non-prileged user. It certianly is not without flaws, but is is fast, catches the most obvious space hogs, and it is free.
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Member 7989122 wrote: It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all.
That's why I do a restore, update new image in the "ready to go" version. Keeping a copy of each second updated vm
Yes... I have 8 or 9 copies of Win7 in different states
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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That is what I do at my home computer, where I can discard the old image with no worries.
At work, there is a requirement that we - for years into the future - must be able to reconstruct the exact same development environment as was built to generate a given release, capable of building a bit identical copy of the released software. One consequence of that was that we would have to archive every single complete disk image. In principle, we could discard those that was never used for any release, but with many projects and many releases, the management problem would be large and the risk of missing info about a release (and deleting the image used to build it) was large. So we rejected that option.
I am far from being a great lover of Docker (especially on Windows, but even the Linux variant is ... well...), but it does solve a number of such problems. Once you have generated a Docker image, it is not affected by any environment changes (unless, of course, the build script fetches stuff from outside through the network interface). The way we have organized our images, in a multi-layered structure, it is very space efficient as well: If, say, one project requires a couple new/updated Python packages, we make a new image with the old one as base, and run a couple "pip install" to create a "varnish layer" that requires space measured in kilobytes. All the unchanged elements are physically shared with the old image (even at runtime).
So we have few if any disk space issues. Still we have issues: Some developers insist on using the latest and greatest version at any time (this goes particularly for Python packages). We could end up with thousands of Docker images, which would cause a significant management problem. So we let the developers use a "development" Python Docker image in the development phase, allowing downloading of any new version. In the relase phase, they are required to switch to a stable Python image that has disabled any network download: The project presents a list of packet versions they "need", we make a new varnish layer with these packets, and that is what is used for the relase build. This seems to be working fine - at least for now
(But that is for the Linux projects. Windows and Docker... arrrgh. We have given up for now. Maybe it will come later.)
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