Free Up Drive Space In Windows 10
I have a 256 GB Samsung SSD which I have partitioned into two parts. One partition has Windows 10 and the other one has PopOS!
The Windows 10 partition is almost 120 GB is size and I had been struggling quite a lot to keep at least 5 GB free for updates and all.
Windows 10’s inbuilt tools to manage storage help you, but up to an extend. If you really want to drill down or wonder why your re-claimable disk space is getting reduced over time, you need to rely on some external tool(s) which can at-least show you a graphical break down of your disk space.
A quick Google search will turn up a list of such tools and that’s exactly how I came to know about this tool WinDirStat. I quickly downloaded it and ran it on my C:\ drive.
Following is the result.
As you can see, Docker has been filling up a significant chunk of my SSD and I had not even used it in months! That’s something that had completely slipped out of my mind. Windows 10 inbuilt tools did not help me in figuring such details out.
Let’s try to reclaim some of the space.
By simply running docker system prune, I was able to recoup 8.245GB worth of space.
Total reclaimed space: 8.254GB
PS C:\Users\91858>Great! Let’s run WinDirStat again to see how much free space I now have.
To my surprise, it still reported that the ext4.vhdx had not reduced in size. It looked like Docker did not return the freed up space back to the operating system. Hmm! Time for another Google search.
According to this post, I needed to prune to data via Docker Desktop app. So I did that.
Voila! I got back20GB worth of free space on my almost filled SSD. WinDirStat tool was quite helpful in this task.
What other tools do you use to manage your disk space on Windows 10? Leave a comment and consider following me on Twitter @rajatsx.
