Free Up Space In Windows 10

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Brayan Sedillo

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Aug 3, 2024, 3:35:17 PM8/3/24

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I have an 8Tb drive where I store my dropbox files on my Windows computer and despite setting all files to be 'online only' as well as going to Dropbox preferences and setting select sync to not sync any folders I am still getting the message "Can't sync not enough free space". In my system settings it appears the files are still taking up space on my "Apple" drive where I have drobox downloaded and have set it to sync to (I have less than 200GB of non-dropbox data on that Apple drive).

I had this problem on my Mac a year ago and solved it by checking the box on the website to not have online files take up hard drive space. I've done the same for my PC. I have unlimited space on my dropbox account. I have updated Dropbox to the latest version (released December 21st 2021). I have read through every relevant online article and forum I could find. So now I am here.

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I believe I have been using Smart Sync (where I would select which folders were local or online only). I selected all of the folders and set them to online only. Then after that wasn't clearing up space, I went to Selective Sync in my settings and unchecked all the folders there.

Sorry for the delayed response. Last week I tried deleting a bunch of files on the internal drive however Dropbox still gave me the error (however I'm not sure if I completely quit and restarted Dropbox then).

Since then I uninstalled dropbox completely, and the second I did that a bunch of 'ghost' dropbox files appeared (I'm using 'ghost' cause I don't know what else to call them, my computer thinks they're taking up space even though I can't open them and they are unreadable). My computer thought these dropbox files were taking up >100Tb of space (see attached picture) which is impossible on my 8Tb drive. The size of 110Tb does make sense given it's from my business partner's shared folder and we have a lot of data on there, however to my knowledge none of those shared folders were ever downloaded or selected to be synced on this drive.

I believe these ghost files (which had never showed up on my computer before) were the primary reason for my computer/dropbox to think there was space being taken up. I know this was a problem on Mac (in terms of offline files appearing to take up space), is there a way to fix this on Windows? I would love to reinstall dropbox but worry that it will take over my computer again.

My E drive is internal. When I tried reinstalling dropbox and having the folders online (after a couple days of waiting for Dropbox to sync) I ran into the same error "cannot sync not enough disk space", however there's still several terrabytes of free space on the disk.

I thought for a second it might be because the disk is damaged, however when I ran some repair software it said it wasn't. I'll look more into this (maybe uninstall Dropbox and reinstall it on a different disk).

Just thought I'd jump in here to say that I use Smart Sync on at least two thirds of the stuff I have in Dropbox, and it still says my hard drive is 90% full, and Online Only files that cannot be opened when Dropbox is off show up as the biggest files in WinDirStat.

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Warranty: There is none. Please read carefully and with all things you find on a random blog, be careful because you have no one to blame but yourself. However, if you take a few minutes, read carefully and do even a few of these tips or just run Disk Cleanup, you'll get lots of space back.

While your are in there, why not do some more maintenance on your machine, blow out that dust and install some updates? Check out the The Technical Friend's Essential Maintenance Checklist for Non-Technical Friend's Windows Computer.

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I'm trying to reduce the amount of drive space taken up by Windows on my servers C Drive - currently the entire drive is taking up 28GB of a 30GB drive... I've used the disk clean up tool that ships with Windows but it didn't identify anything that could be removed (really!)...

The Windows Directory is taking up 17.5GB of the 30GB drive so a big chunk. I've seen that you can reduce the size of the WinSxS directory within Windows which is currently taking up about 8GB, and this director (given it's size) seems a likely candidate for size reduction. I found this tool - but it is not compatible (won't install stating incompatible) - see: -us/help/2852386/disk-cleanup-wizard-addon-lets-users-delete-outdate...

I have a dual boot with ubuntu 16.04 and windows 10, ubuntu was installed alongside windows in a same drive. The problem is only 30 gb is allocated for linux and all other for windows. Now i want to add more space for linux system WITHOUT UNINSTALLING UBUNTU Please help

Use gparted to increase your Ubuntu partition. The software is pretty easy to figure out. Right click on the partition of interest and select "resize/move". Make sure you are cognizant of where the partition has data (data is yellow and "assumed" empty is white) and avoid shrinking any partition where there is no white space left!

NOTE: you may run Gparted from your Ubuntu partition, but then it may give you a hard time because you are trying to do work on a live partition (you have to unmount, the drive you are using, etc...). So you might get away without using a live CD, but why mess around when a live CD is the better way to go? (opinion only)

I don't use Windows 10, but in Windows 7 there is a way to shrink the size of your partition. Right-click "my computer", then select "manage" and from there you go to the "Storage" and open "Disk Management". There you will want to reduce the size of your windows drive. this is important to make sure you create empty HDD space for your Ubuntu to grow onto.

NOTE: The Windows work you do may create space on the other side of the hard disk. In that case you will need to use gparted to move the partition, or grow it in the other direction and then shrink it back to the original size.

NOTE: before you do anything back up your data!!! You will grow your Ubuntu partition and that will be easy. If your windows breaks, use the Windows install DVD to fix it - easy. BUT if you overwrite your data that is held by Windows... you will never get it back.

You could try WizTree (wiztreefree.com), which is similar to WinDirStat but it bypasses the filesystem driver and reads the MFT directly if run as an administrator. It will show space taken by alternate data streams, metadata files ($MFT, $Secure, $BadClus, etc.), and directories you don't have access to. It doesn't appear to show space allocated for directory indexes, and it may miss some other things, but I wouldn't be surprised if the culprit does show up.

I've met once such an incident: It was due to Alternate Data Streams, a feature of NTFS for classic MacOS compatibility in shared folders. Unfortunately this ill-fated feature can be used for malicious purposes. In simple terms, it can be used to fill up your disk but the reserved space cannot be located, as in your case. If you want to check on this, I suggest MS sysinternals tool, streams.

The default permissions on C:\System Volume Information are NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)F. This means that even when you Run as Administrator you can't normally see files in it. You can use e.g. psexec to launch an application under the Local System account, which will then allow WinDirStat et. al. to display everything, or you can use it to add Administrators to the ACL. In particular, if you are using Previous Versions then the volume shadow copies are stored within this directory, and these can get quite large.

This was very useful. I've found that Windows Server 2019 has set the default size of the Failover Clustering Diagnostic log to 18014398507384832Kb (!) so server disk was filling up. WinDirStat did not show this .EVTX file but WizTree identified it. Saved the day.