Low On Disk Space?
We've all been there at least once. A computer you rely on starts behaving erratically and slows to a crawl. After a bit of review, you realize that the system root drive is full, and Windows is very unhappy about the situation.
We need to free up some disk space, and we need to do it quickly.
Finding Large Files on Windows
Whether the affected system is a server or workstation, you need to take action to restore functionality. In such cases, one of the first steps we recommend is using FolderSizes to create a Largest Files report for the affected volume(s).
Let's get started. In the FolderSizes main window, click the File Reporter button in the ribbon bar. Enter the file system path(s) of interest (perhaps the root drive path in this case) in the File Reporter location bar and click the Start button. FolderSizes immediately gets to work analyzing the specified file system path(s).
The screenshot below shows the Largest Files report contents. It's not uncommon to find extremely large files lying around that are no longer needed. For example, we sometimes see .DMP files consuming many gigabytes of disk space. Such dump files can result from system crashes, and they're typically not useful for anything other than debugging purposes. Removing them can free up a significant amount of disk space very quickly.
Deleting Large Files
Since this particular Windows memory dump isn't likely to be useful in practice, we can simply delete it to free up a good chunk of disk space. You can do this directly within FolderSizes by selecting the dump file and clicking the Delete toolbar button.
The Power of FolderSizes File Reports
The Largest Files report is just one example of how FolderSizes helps you to quickly explore disk space usage patterns. It also quickly identifies old, temporary, and duplicate files, and can classify file distributions by age, size, depth, and much more.
Searching for Large Files
FolderSizes also includes a powerful search tool that can quickly identify files and folders based on their size. That's right, you can search for *folders* by their cumulative size - something that's not possible with Windows File Explorer.
FolderSizes can easily search multiple file systems (local and network) simultaneously, and these searches can even be scheduled to run automatically (with delivery via email) via the built-in scheduler.
Conclusion
In this specific case, deleting this one file may free up enough disk space to get the system running correctly again. There's likely more disk space analysis work to be done, but you can quickly spot multiple file removal candidates (which add up to many GB of wasted space) just from this one report alone.
FolderSizes is a free disk space analyzer that helps make this process quick and easy. It's a tool that every Windows user should have in their toolkit.