WHAT’S EATING MY STORAGE?
It’s been observed that data seems to expand to fill the available storage, and that’s certainly true when it comes to PCs. It’s horribly easy to accumulate files without thinking about disk space, until there’s suddenly none left.
Yet it’s not entirely our fault. Desktop applications just keep getting bigger and games can be enormous: Cyberpunk 2077 calls for 70GB of hard disk space, while Hitman 3 weighs in at 80GB. Meanwhile, disk sizes have stagnated as we’ve switched from cheap mechanical disks to much faster – but pricier – SSDs.
If you’re constantly running out of space, therefore, don’t feel too bad: that’s just the way the technology is at the moment. In five or ten years it will probably be possible to buy a huge SSD for a tiny price, but for now we must manage our limited space as best we can.
GETTING AN OVERVIEW
Windows doesn’t exactly make it easy to see what’s consuming your disk space. If you open an Explorer window, it will show you the sizes of any files in the current directory, but the “size” column is left blank for folders. If you want to find out the total size of a folder’s contents, you must right-click on it, select “Properties” and wait, possibly for a minute or more, while Windows scans its contents and calculates the total size. It’s a cumbersome process that’s hardly convenient for quickly spotting which folders are consuming more than their fair share of storage.
Once you’ve been using Windows for a year or two, your hard disk will probably be laden with unneeded items
You can’t customise the Explorer window to show folder sizes, but you can use a replacement file manager, such as the open-source Explorer++ (), which offers such an option
