How to see what is taking up a lot of storage space on Windows 10

When your hard drive is about to fill up you will probably wonder what is taking up space. At this point, a feature called "Storage sense" of Windows 10 will take effect.

On Windows 10, Storage sense helps you analyze which types of data take up the most storage resources. In addition, it also helps you to quickly free up storage space.

How to see what is taking up a lot of storage space on Windows 10

To analyze which types of data are taking up a lot of storage resources on Windows 10 versions 1903, 1909, 2004, 20H2 and later, follow these steps:

1. Open Settings in Windows 10
2. Click Systems
3. Click Storage

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1. Here, the system will list the C: drive and some file types that take up the most storage space
2. Click Show more categories to see how much other file types occupy

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1. Scroll down to the More storage settings section below and select View storage usage on other drives 
2. If there are multiple drives, you select each drive to see detailed information such as what is displayed with C drive:

Thanks to this information, you know which files are taking up the most storage space. You can also click on each file type to see details and clean up the file if you like.

With Windows 10 as old as 1809, you do the following steps:

1. Still go to Settings> Systems> Storage
2. Under Local storage, click each drive to see details
3. This is the same as above, You can click on each item to get more information and take action if needed. Example You can access the App & games section to view and remove applications / games that are no longer useful

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Of these, the Temporary files section is something you can manually delete if needed. This is the item that mostly contains junk files, without any function or task.

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Good luck.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 09 January 2021