Did your drive suddenly fill up even if you haven't installed any new apps or downloaded large files? Here's how you can fix it.

Storage space on your system's hard drive doesn't vanish all of a sudden. However, if you notice Windows Explorer incorrectly reporting free space available on your disk, it can happen for many reasons.

So, let's see why Windows reports incorrect hard disk free space and what you can do to reclaim the missing space.

There is no straightforward answer to this question because the causes of this problem are numerous. You may have hidden files or a work project file taking over 100s of GB of space.

In other instances, Windows too can take a large amount of space to store older Windows update backups as well as system restore points. Your system's recycle bin collects tons of trash files and can take up plenty of space if not cleaned frequently.

Instead of making a wild guess, you can better understand your system's storage space occupancy using a disk usage analyzer.

WinDir Stat is a free disk space analyzing utility for Windows. It shows disk usage stats sorted by file/subtree size. You can expand the partitions to view space taken by the folders and sub-folders, making it easy to get an idea of what is taking space in your computer.

In the right pane, you can view files occupying most space by their data type. Click on the data type to highlight it in the color-coded chart. Next, click the highlighted colored box to locate the files.

It also features a Clean Up option. You can use it to clean up unwanted files from any folder. For optimal results, in WinDir Stat, locate and select the folder taking up a large amount of space. Then, click on Clean Up and select Explore Here. Now you can manually choose and delete large unnecessary files.

If you find WinDir Stat intimidating, Folder Size is an excellent alternative. It is a free Windows utility to analyze your hard drive space usage and shows the file and folder size to identify the folder filling up your storage drive.

Once installed, run Folder Size as administrator. Then, select the drive to scan. After the scan, it will list all the folders and files in the drive sorted by size. From here, you can explore and clean up the folders to free up some space.

When enabled, your Windows system automatically creates new restore points when it detects a major change to your system. However, if you haven't configured the disk space usage for restore points, you are likely to have multiple restore points taking tons of space.

This is one of the common contributing factors to diminishing space on your hard drive. Fortunately, you can not only delete the older restore points but also configure how much space Windows can use to store these backups.

When Windows reaches the allocated quota, it will delete the older restore points to make space for the new ones.

To configure disk usage space for System Protection in Windows:

Next, open File Explorer to see how much storage space you have reclaimed with deleted restore points.

Restore points come in handy to recover your system in the event of a failure. Since you have deleted all your restore points, we recommend creating a new restore point immediately.

Windows automatically schedules a maintenance activity known as System Maintenance on your computer. It can fix broken shortcuts and release space occupied by troubleshooting history data and disk volume errors.

If System Maintenance is not working, you can use the troubleshooter to check issues with System Maintenance. While Windows automatically runs this troubleshooter periodically, you can also run it manually from the Control Panel.

To run System Maintenance troubleshooter:

If you are experiencing the issue in the older version of Windows 10 and 11, check and install the latest available system updates. Windows updates often bring performance improvements and bug fixes.

To check for Windows updates:

Computers are notorious for building up junk files sourced from system operations, apps, user content, and more. Windows 10 and 11 feature a clean-up tool that periodically checks and cleans up junk files, including temporary files, files in your Downloads folder, and recycle bin.

However, if you haven't configured clean-up schedules, here's how to remove junk files from your Windows PC. This involves configuring Storage Sense and cleaning up junk files from different places.

The curious case of Windows reporting wrong disk space often leads you to a hidden file taking up a large chunk of space on your hard drive. You can use a third-party disk analyzer to find what's taking up all the space on your system and perform a clean-up.

That said, periodic clean-ups can help you keep a tab on your storage space usage and yield performance improvements as well.

Tashreef is a developer and works as a technical writer at MakeUseOf. With a bachelor's degree in Computer Applications, he has over 5 years of experience and covers Microsoft Windows and everything around it. When not looking for a missing semicolon or churning out text, you can find him trying FPS titles or looking for new animated shows and movies.

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