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56 |^ |^ December 2019
Monitor your drive space
Find how what happens when you run out of free
space, and how to keep an eye on how much is left
hat low disk space
warning we flagged in
the introduction is
unlikely to be the first
indication you get that
you’re running out of
disk space. It’s not designed to appear
until you have 200MB or less free disk
space – a mere drop in the ocean these
days. Instead, Windows’ first warning
will likely appear when you open File
Explorer to the ‘This PC’ view to see your
drive’s usage is represented by a red bar
rather than the regular blue one. This
appears when your drive has less than
10% free space left, although the
seriousness of the warning does depend
on the size of the drive. For example, a
64GB drive with under 6GB left is more
worrying than a 2TB drive with around
180GB free space still available.More drive alerts
Windows Update will also throw up
an alert when it discovers there’s
insufficient space to install the latest
round of updates – this usually appears
when you don’t have secondary storage
attached to your PC for it to use as
temporary file storage. It can pop up
when there’s as much as 11GB still free
on your drive for major feature updates,
but of more concern is if it shows when
you’re trying to install a cumulative
update, which indicates your drive has
less than 3GB left.
All computers make use of smallrecovery partitions (anywhere from
500MB for a basic Windows recovery
partition to 8GB for a partition housing
the files needed to reinstall Windows).
Sometimes, these recovery partitions
can be assigned drive letters in
Windows – often in error. Because
they’re designed to store specific files
and not anything else, they can be
filled almost to capacity, which results
in Windows throwing up a low space
disk warning.
The solution is simple: type ‘disk’
into the Search box and click ‘Create
and format hard disk partitions’ toopen Disk Management. Locate your
Recovery partition in the list, then
right-click it and choose ‘Change
Drive Letter and Paths’. Click RemoveAn alternative view
If you’re looking for a slightly different approach
to viewing your drive’s makeup, try SpaceSniffer
(www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/)
instead. It has a more modern user interface, but
more importantly provides a visual view that helps
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Again, be sure to run it as an administrator. Unlike
WinDirStat you must focus a view on one drive at a
time, but thanks to its labelling system it’s easier to
spot which folders contain the most data as they’re
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double-click one to zoom in to view its contents or
double-click its parent folder (displayed above it)
to zoom back out.
,I\RXNQRZZKLFKÀOHVDUHOLNHO\WRWDNHXSPRVW
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type (such as *.mp4) and click the Filter button to focus
on that instead. Right-clicking a displayed folder will
bring up the File Explorer context menu, allowing you
WRGHOHWHXQZDQWHGÀOHVTXLFNO\LI\RXZLVKA red bar indicates that less than 10% free
space remains on the drive in question.To configure Storage Sense, navigate to Settings >
System > Storage and click ‘Show more categories’.Treemapping is a method of displaying hierarchical data, such as the folder structure on
a large hard drive, in a logical way, making it easy for a human to understand.IMAGES: Microsoft, Uderzo, WinDirStat