windows 10 seems to keep taking more disk space

[pmv]

My C drive (an 128gb SSD) is nearly full and I don't put anything much on that drive. It seems as if windows update keeps increasing the space requirements - not sure where the space is disappearing to otherwise. For ages I had about 20Gb free on there - never really paid much attention, tbh, haven't thought about it since setting it up nearly 10 years ago - then recently it dropped to 10Gb then 8Gb then 5Gb over a few days. For one thing it looks as Windows 10 has installed several large games on there that I never asked for and was never asked about - why the hell is "Disney Magic Kingdoms" on there, taking up 1Gb?

 

[bba-tcg]

Download and run Windirstat: https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable and you'll find out where that space is going.

 

[C1]

re: "why the hell is "Disney Magic Kingdoms" on there, taking up 1Gb?"

Probably because Disney pays MS for doing it. (Welcome to capitalism.)

Couple things.

Watch out about insufficient breathing space on your storage drive (OS partition).
With spinners at least, one should allow 30% free space. With the small amount of
free space that you are reporting, Im surprised that the OS still is operable. Remember that
the OS needs space for caching (eg, write file) as well as many other things.

Also, ya, Im now having issues too with Win10 automatically downloading things to try to
sell me to use (eg, one drive, MS office account). It's now putting up pop up screens telling
about need to finish windows update with the reported update features being things which I
consider to be nuisance. Seems to be particularly problematic with the 22H2 version. .

Good luck

 

[JackMDS]

Lucky Us in the Modern world. One can replace (or add) for less then the price of full fast Burger meal an SSD of 240 GB.

Amazon.com

 

[pmv]

Lucky Us in the Modern world. One can replace (or add) for less then the price of full fast Burger meal an SSD of 240 GB.

Amazon.com

Yeah, I've ordered a larger SSD, but it hasn't arrived yet (when it does may be back asking for advice about cloning boot drives).

Just alarmed at how, having coped perfectly well with the original drive for all this time, Windows has recently started eating all the free space.

 

[JackMDS]

Cloning software.

Many thinks that this is the best (Not Free).

The Best Disk Cloning Software of 2025 – Acronis

Looking for the best cloning software? Explore the vast options available and learn about the top factors to consider for optimal cloning software selection.

www.acronis.com

Top 5 Free & Reliable Hard Disk Drive Cloning Software

Discover the top free and reliable HDD cloning tools. Compare features, benefits and drawbacks of the best free software with our guide.

www.techrepublic.com

Those who need to save use something from this selection - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/five-free-and-reliable-cloning-tools/

 

[VirtualLarry]

Lucky Us in the Modern world. One can replace (or add) for less then the price of full fast Burger meal an SSD of 240 GB.

Amazon.com

And this is the correct reply. Recommend at a minimum, a 1TB SATA SSD for $32 or so USD from Newegg (team group, Silicon power, maybe PNY.)

If your mobo supports M.2 NVMe, consider one of those for not much more $$$, for higher speeds.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just alarmed at how, having coped perfectly well with the original drive for all this time, Windows has recently started eating all the free space.

...and I used to run Win7 64-bit on a Core2Quad with a 40GB OCZ SSD. It was (barely) big enough (Win7 64-bit took 20GB+16GB pagefile/hiberfil.)

Plus the temp files used by adobe flash player when streaming video content. I have a friend that had a similar config (OK, I gave it to him, his first SSD, along with Win7 retail), and had to link him to the adobe flash temp dir with a shortcut, to go in there and manually empty everything, once windows started complaining about space.

We had to both eventually upgrade SSDs, after too many Win7 updates just ate up all of the spare space on the drive.

I've had this "pain" too, on laptops that come with Win8/Win10 and only 32GB of emmc. Ugh!

 

[RLGL]

"Disney Magic Kingdoms" on there, taking up 1Gb?

Somewhere as time went on something you clicked on something, while on the internet, triggered the download or you have malware.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Somewhere as time went on something you clicked on something, while on the internet, triggered the download or you have malware.

Or just Windows 10. wsappx, bringer of many surprises.

 

[pmv]

Somewhere as time went on something you clicked on something, while on the internet, triggered the download or you have malware.

Pretty sure I didn't click on anything on the net. I suspect the 'malware' I have is called "Windows".

Anyway, got some space back by doing a full shut down and startup (realised I was habitually only ever hibernating the thing) and telling windows to move those unasked-for games to another, spinning-metal, drive. (I mean, I _might_ try them one day...seems at least some of them are "free" apparently, though I'm betting they turn out to be the sort of thing that have in-game purchases)

And planning to replace it with a new 480GB ssd (as the original drive is so old it might start failing before long anyway, so might as well), but having real trouble summoning up the energy to actually do it.

 

[pmv]

Cloning software.

Many thinks that this is the best (Not Free).

The Best Disk Cloning Software of 2025 – Acronis

Looking for the best cloning software? Explore the vast options available and learn about the top factors to consider for optimal cloning software selection.

www.acronis.com

Top 5 Free & Reliable Hard Disk Drive Cloning Software

Discover the top free and reliable HDD cloning tools. Compare features, benefits and drawbacks of the best free software with our guide.

www.techrepublic.com

Those who need to save use something from this selection - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/five-free-and-reliable-cloning-tools/

Used Macrium Reflect trial version to clone the old boot SSD to the new one. Then expanded the windows partition on the new drive to use the full space using AOMEII (as by default it ended up the same size as the original drive's partition, with the rest of the space unused).

Unfortunately when I swapped the SATA cables around to put the new SSD in the SATA slot the old one used to have, I got a "Bootmgr not found" error on booting. Going back to the original SSD let me boot normally again (and could even see and access the new cloned windows partition on the new drive if I connected it via a different SATA ). But just couldn't get it to boot from the new SSD. Any time I selected that for booting it just gave that error message.

For some reason it turned out I needed to then rewrite the MBR on the new SSD using AOMEII (once I'd booted with the original SSD/windows partition), and that then allowed me to then boot from the new one. Now I've done that it seems to be working.

Don't really understand why that was the case - I thought cloning a drive would copy _all_ the necessary stuff? Unless expanding the partition on the new SSD to use all the disk space somehow messed up the boot record part?

Just mentioning it here in case anyone else one day has the same problem and googles it!

 

[crashtech]

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but Disk Cleanup has a handy button at the bottom, "Clean up system files" which will help one delete all the extra Windows Update files. Since many updates are the equivalent of OS upgrades nowadays, they can leave behind installation files that are quite large.

 

[A///]

System restore reserve space sounds like the culprit.

 

[igor_kavinski]

...and I used to run Win7 64-bit on a Core2Quad with a 40GB OCZ SSD.

My first SSD was the OCZ Vertex 30GB. Ran for about a year and changed to Corsair F60 when the 30GB remaining life dropped to 5%.

 

[JackMDS]

Used Macrium Reflect trial version to clone the old boot SSD to the new one. Then expanded the windows partition on the new drive to use the full space using AOMEII (as by default it ended up the same size as the original drive's partition, with the rest of the space unused).

Unfortunately when I swapped the SATA cables around to put the new SSD in the SATA slot the old one used to have, I got a "Bootmgr not found" error on booting. Going back to the original SSD let me boot normally again (and could even see and access the new cloned windows partition on the new drive if I connected it via a different SATA ). But just couldn't get it to boot from the new SSD. Any time I selected that for booting it just gave that error message.

That is one of the reason that I put Acronis at the top. Nothing is perfect But True Image (Acronis) is much more reliable and faster then the others.

In combo with True Image I keep a copy of https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Help to easily solve problems of MBR-GPT, Boot, and Partition elements. (and it is freeware).