Many have had a situation where they seem to have gotten rid of excess garbage in their computer, but not much space has been freed up. At such moments, the question arises: what is the matter? What are these bulky files and where are they located?
Standard way without third-party software.
This is the simplest method that does not require any special software. Everything you need, you already have.
Go to the disk volume where the scan will take place.
On Windows 10 and 8, click on that little "tick". With it, you will open an additional menu that will come in handy.
In the new menu, press the buttons that are highlighted. It is not necessary to choose a giant size, you can start with any other, but note that in this case it will take a very long time to check.
On Windows 7, in the upper right corner, add a filter by size.
By selecting the size, you will automatically start the search. After verification, you will receive the entire result of the work done. But be careful, because system documents are also included in this list. If you do not know what kind of file it is, then it is better not to touch it.
Ainvo Disk Explorer utility for finding large documents
This program is able to find large documents in the system. But you have to delete them manually. That is, this program is only for searching, it does not provide any extra functions. You can download it here: http://ainvo.com/index.php?r=aint/create&filename=files%2Fproducts%2Fde%2Fainvo-disk-explorer-setup.exe&lang=ru.
After installation, immediately launch the utility and start checking by clicking on the required button.
Tip: if you need to check a specific drive, then visit the Settings menu. There you can specify which drive to scan.
After a while, the program will give you the result. Huge files you can see by clicking on the button highlighted in the screenshot.
This is where the most difficult work begins. The fact is that the program shows absolutely all large documents, including system ones. Therefore, it is highly recommended to carefully study the entire list of utilities.
Don't be surprised if you find documents from an old program that you got rid of a couple of years ago. Just feel free to remove them.
But if you do not know what kind of file it is, then it is better not to touch it at all. After all, deleting a system document can lead to global problems with the device. So be careful.
ηSearcher utility for searching large files
This utility has several additional features that allow you to refine your search for large files. You can download it here: http://www.ru.n-group.info/nsearcher/download.php.
After installation, feel free to open it. But do not rush to start, first see what additional features it offers you.
You can specify the minimum size of the document, where specifically to look for, and even some dates (created, modified or opened).
When specifying all known data, simply click on the "Start Search" button.
In a few minutes, you will have access to a detailed analysis of all "heavy" files. You can sort it by specifying the criteria you are interested in. Documents that can be deleted without harm to the system are highlighted in green. But if the file is colored orange, then it is better not to touch it.
Thus, you can find large files on your computer and clear several gigabytes of memory. Such a global cleaning should not be carried out very often. For example, once every six months will be enough. But do not forget about the timely cleaning of the device, because in this way you will help the system get rid of long-unneeded files that take away precious memory.
This is the one that over time there is not enough space. On the one hand, we bought ourselves 1 TB and it seems good, now everything will work out. But over time, it turns out that it "clogs" and you don't want to delete the old one (and suddenly come in handy), but there is no place for a new one.
Then there comes a moment in which something can be released. But sometimes this is not enough.
Then a reasonable question arises in my head " What is taking up so much space on my disk?".
First of all, they "go" to folders with movies, then games and programs. And you have to remove them gritting your teeth.
So, I will not torment you, but I will write about several programs, the purpose of which is to show how many and which files (folders) take up the most space on your disk. Of course, all of them (like all the programs that are provided on my site) are free.
Looking ahead, I’ll let you know that everyone has the same meaning - to analyze the system and visualize what and how it takes place, while showing some additional features. As a result, you can see and delete (if desired) unnecessary large files.
The first program to analyze a disk and search for large files and folders is WinDirStat.
After installation and launch, the main program window will look like this:
In it, you can specify what exactly needs to be scanned: all drives, a specific drive, or a separate folder.
After selecting (I chose one system drive), the scanning process will begin:
As a result of which the result will be issued. The program window is divided into 3 parts:
1 - result by folders
2 - result by files (types/) with indication of their legend
3 - general diagram. The meaning is simple - the more space it takes, the larger the display.
The results are shown in descending order for convenience, i.e. The "largest" files are displayed at the top.
Thus, you can clearly see which files and folders take up how much space on the disk.
Now let's look at what you can do with this information besides just viewing it, namely, pay attention to the top menu with buttons:
Since the program is in Russian and the buttons contain tooltips, I can only list what you can do with a folder or file directly from this program:
As you can see - all the most necessary functions.
By the way, with the help of this program, you can also check external and network drives.
Another similar program is JDiskReport.
It differs from the previous one primarily in the absence of the Russian language.
After launch, you will be prompted to select a directory to scan and open the saved file with the analysis.
You can specify the whole disk and go:
The window is divided into two parts: the location is indicated on the left, and the diagram is formed on the right.
Let's deal with the left side.
It displays a list of directories sorted by "most", ie. the more space the folder takes up, the higher it is. In subfolders the same story.
The right side is much more interesting.
In the lower part, you can change the view of the diagram (out of the four provided) and enable the display of files (tick Show files).
In the upper part, you can switch to the 50 "best" files ( top 50), see how many files in size occupy certain places ( Size Dist), when and how many files were last modified ( modified) and how much space certain types of files take up ( types).
In the top menu of the program itself, only two switches are interesting: the first, for sorting alphabetically (and not by "most"), the second for displaying the number of files (not volume).
But you can only view this information. To delete files, you will have to open Explorer and look for this folder or file there. But you can also right-click on the folder and select Open Explorer... to open.
The next program to analyze and find large files is Scanner.
The program differs from the previous ones in that it does not require installation (portable).
After starting, it immediately scans all disks and shows summary information:
You can select a specific drive, as a result of the scan, the volume of folders will be shown:
When the system notifies you that the disk is running out of free space, the first thing the administrator does is try to find all the large files that take up the most space. You can use Windows Explorer to search for large files (there are several predefined search patterns by size), your favorite file manager, or third-party utilities. However, all these tools, unlike PowerShell, require installation on the computer. Let's look at an example of quickly searching for large files on a disk using PowerShell.
To get a list of files in a specific directory (including subfolders) and their sizes, you can use the cmdlet Get-ChildItem. The cmdlet can search for files all over the disk, or in a specific folder (for example, in user profiles or any other folders).
Let's list the 10 largest files on the C:\ drive:
Get-ChildItem c:\ -r| sort -descending -property length | select -first 10 name, Length
Depending on the size of the disk and the number of files on it, the command may take some time to complete.
Key -r(Recurse) indicates that it is necessary to recursively traverse all nested objects (directories). You can limit the check to a certain level of nesting using the parameter –Depth.
If you don't specify a path, all subdirectories in the current directory will be searched.
As you can see, we got a list of the ten largest files on the disk, sorted in order of decreasing file size.
Advice. When accessing some directories even with administrator rights, the cmdlet may return an access error:
Get-ChildItem: Access denied at path 'C:\Windows\CSC'.
string:1 character:1
+ Get-ChildItem c:\ -r|sort -descending -property length | select -firs ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo: PermissionDenied: (C:\Windows\CSC:String) , UnauthorizedAccessException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId: DirUnauthorizedAccessError,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand
To suppress such errors, use the parameter -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue.
As you can see, the size of the files is displayed in bytes. For convenience, they can be converted to megabytes. In addition, you can display the directory where the found file is stored:
Get-ChildItem c:\ -r -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |sort -descending -property length | select -first 10 name, DirectoryName, @(Name="Mb";Expression=(::round($_.length / 1MB, 2)))
The resulting plate can be converted into a convenient graphical form using the Out-GridView cmdlet:
Get-ChildItem c:\ -r|sort -descending -property length | select -first 10 name, DirectoryName, @(Name="Mb";Expression=(::round($_.length / 1MB, 2))) | Out GridView
Similarly, you can find all files that are larger than a certain value, such as 200 MB):
$size=200*1024*1024
GCi C:\ -recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | where-object ($_.length -gt $size) | Sort-Object length | ft fullname
The list of files can be uploaded to a CSV file like this:
GCi C:\ -recurse | where-object ($_.length -gt $size) | Sort-Object length | ft fullname | Export-Csv c:\pc\LargeFiles_Report.csv
Do you know what the most frequent question my friends ask me is “How to find the largest files on a computer? I cleaned everything, but there was no free disk space. What else to delete and how to find these huge files taking up disk space?
These are the questions we are going to address now. I have already described to you on the pages of this site, how to find and remove duplicate files, and today I'll tell you how to find large files on your computer in just a couple of mouse clicks.
How serious I am about the cleanliness of my beloved computer and constantly monitor it, and today I found more than 3 GB of extra files only on the system drive. What was wildly surprised.
And to help us in the search for the largest files on the computer is a small, free and Russian-language program Ainvo Disk Explorer.
I immediately warn you that this program only looks for the largest files on your computer, but you yourself will have to delete them, as well as determine their degree of need.
But do not be afraid, there is nothing wrong with that - I will show you everything by personal example, as always.
The main principle: if you don't know what the file is, don't touch it.
So, let's go, as Gagarin said ...
Download Ainvo Disk Explorer: 3.45 MB
Installation and use Ainvo Disk Explorer
You can remove the top checkbox. Installed, with which you and congratulations. On the desktop got a shortcut to the program ...
The program has started and you can immediately press "Start" ...
...or go to "Settings" and select the drive that will be analyzed for the largest files.
The program will think, think, and give you the result of its analysis, which can be viewed by clicking ...
And this is where the fun begins...
It turns out that after the “complete” removal of the program recently described on the site, I still have a “tail” of 85 MB in size on the system disk.
By clicking on "Open directory with a file" I got to the folder with this harmful file and safely deleted it.
And this "tail" of 50 MB has been hanging in the computer for about a year ...
Once upon a time I installed "live wallpaper".
And I also found a backup copy of my smartphone, which I said goodbye to 8 months ago. Do you know how big this file was? 2.5 GB!!! On the system drive!
I agree that you need to know and remember which programs have long been removed from the computer, but strain your brains - no program will do this for you.
But I don’t know the origin and purpose of these files - so I don’t touch them.
I also strongly advise against touching files whose address begins with ...
A situation very familiar to many ... We regularly download a lot of things from the Internet - movies, videos, music, toys, and so on. As a result, many people are always too lazy to clean their computer from unnecessary information stored on the hard drive, or there is always no time :) As a result, the hard drives of the computer are packed so that in Windows Explorer the amount of remaining free space is already marked with a red bar, i.e. the place is suitable by the end. And it's good when all the unnecessary accumulates somewhere in one folder (for example, the "Downloads" folder for downloading files from the Internet). But usually a lot of large files are scattered in batches all over the hard drive, and then it becomes very inconvenient to determine what exactly takes up the most space and where it is located on the computer. Standard Windows tools do not allow you to quickly assess where the most data is stored on the computer, but there are special third-party programs for this purpose, one of which is WinDirStat, which is free. With it, you can clearly see which files and in what volume, where exactly they are located on the hard drive, which makes it easy to analyze which of these we no longer need and can be deleted immediately! So, in this article, I will show you how easy it is to estimate what and how much space is taking up on your hard drive, as well as where it is located.
Approximate estimation of disk space occupied by files through the built-in Windows Explorer
To begin with, I will show how, through the built-in Windows Explorer, it was possible to at least roughly estimate where and what takes up space from us. To do this, open Windows Explorer and in it, first of all, the "Computer" section (or "My Computer" if Windows XP).
This section displays all local drives that may contain your data. A local disk is like a partition on your hard disk, that is, a part of it. For example, I have 3 local disks (see image above), i.e. the entire hard disk is divided into 3 parts.
You can find detailed information about what a hard drive is in general, how it looks and about other computer devices, in a separate article -.
In this window, you can immediately see how much space is occupied on each of the local disks and how much is there in total. If there is not enough space left, the bar under the disk will turn red. For example, my “D” section is heavily clogged, which I use specifically to store all sorts of personal data. Programs and Windows itself are stored on the C: drive.
So, go to the disk where the most free space is occupied. Now it remains only to walk through the folders and manually evaluate the volume of each. For some reason, Windows does not show through the corresponding “Size” column of the explorer how much space a particular folder occupies. Shows only the size of the files in the open folder. To see how much space a folder takes up, you need to move the mouse cursor over it and without clicking, hold the cursor on the folder for about 3 seconds. As a result, information will appear in the pop-up window, where the “Size” item will be.
This is the volume on the disk that this folder occupies.
Or you can right-click (hereinafter "RMB") on the folder, then select "Properties" from the context menu.
In the window that opens, we will see the size of the folder:
And thus, opening the largest folders one after another, we will eventually see the folder where the largest files are stored, which take up the most disk space. But if there are many such places? For example, movies in different quantities are scattered in different folders + games and all sorts of other files. Then the search will turn out to be already difficult, inconvenient. It’s easier when the user himself roughly remembers where they put what and neatly puts everything into folders, for example, films and videos in “Video”, pictures in “Images”. And even in this case, you will not immediately appreciate what, where and how the situation is with the files, especially with large hard drives, 1.5 TB or more.
Clear and understandable assessment of disk space occupied by files using the WinDirStat program
The WinDirStat program will allow you to immediately see clearly which folders and files, how much space they occupy on all local drives. In this case, you can immediately sort by volume, so that the files and folders that take up the most disk space are displayed first. You can also see clearly what kind of files these are by format (video, or something else, for example), as well as many more useful functions...
Downloading and installing the program
The program is installed very simply and does not require any special settings during installation.
You can read more about installing programs for Windows in the article -.
The official website of the program, where you can download it:
In the next window, you do not need to configure anything and just click Next:
In the next two windows, just click "Next" too.
In the last window, click "Close" to complete the installation:
After the installation is completed, the program will be launched automatically.
Using the program
Using the program is very simple. When you start the program, you are prompted to select which existing hard disk partitions (local disks) will be analyzed. If you store almost everything on one disk, then select "Individual disks", mark the desired disk and click "OK". But if the data can be scattered across different disks, then it is better to check "All local disks" (1) and click "OK".
Then the program will start analyzing the selected partitions of the hard disk in order to display a complete “picture” of what and where is taking up space from you, indicating the file formats. The scanning process will be displayed as running yellow pacmen (like from an old computer game):
The first time the analysis process can take several minutes, and when you run the program again, it will be much faster. After the analysis is completed, the program window will look like this:
The column at the top left displays your selected hard disk partitions directly, indicating the space occupied on each, the number of folders, files, and other information. The column on the right contains information about the types of files that you have on your computer, also indicating the total size for each type of file, their number, and at the same time, a certain color is assigned to each type of file. These colors allow you to visually see in the window below how much space is occupied by a particular type of file.
Analysis of the occupied volume using the "tree" of files and folders
Let's start with the main window, that is, the one located at the top left.
Here, it basically makes sense to pay attention to the "Size" column, which initially arranges all your disks and folders in them by the amount occupied on the computer, in descending order.
For example, in my example, you can see that the total used space on all disks is 917.7 GB. At the same time, the most occupied space on the "D" drive: 436.1 GB. This can also be seen from the "Percentage" column, i.e. the column shows how much space is occupied on a particular disk from the total occupied space on all.
By double-clicking on a drive, we open its contents in a similar way to Windows Explorer.
Here we can already easily estimate how much space each of the folders inside takes up, focusing on the same columns "Size" and "Percentage". And again, the most capacious folders will be initially located at the top for convenience. At the very bottom, respectively, there will be folders that occupy a minimum of free disk space. The color code in the column "Percentage" means the number of available inside this folder. The larger the bar, the more folders inside in relation to the number of files. In principle, this is not the indicator that should be focused on.
If there are files in a folder, then for convenience they are grouped as "Files" so that you can open this group and see all the files at once, and not mixed with folders.
In this way, you can quickly assess which drives and folders on them take up the most space on your computer and analyze what exactly is in them, and then delete what you do not need. To delete an item, you need to right-click on it and select one of the options "Delete (to Trash)" or "Delete (unrecoverable)".
In the first case, the elements (folders or files) are deleted, as we are accustomed to, to the trash, and from there they can, if necessary, be returned. In the second case, the files are permanently deleted, bypassing the recycle bin and it will be possible to restore them, except perhaps with special recovery programs, such as R.Saver or a paid analogue of R-Studio.
Analysis of space occupied by files by their types
Using the window on the right in conjunction with the window below, you can visually assess which files (by their type) take up the most disk space. The file types will also be sorted by size in descending order, i.e. those files at the top that take up the most space. True, here, in order to navigate, you should know what each of the listed file types is, what it serves for and what program it opens.
For example, in my image, you can see that MOV files (.mov) take up the most space, followed by TechSmith Recording files (.trec), Vmware virtual disk file (.vmdk), etc.
".mov" files, for example, are one of the video file formats that can result when you record video from a camera or camera. Open, in principle, any video player. “.trec” files are videos recorded through the Camtasia Studio program (for screen recording, video editing). ".vmdk" are virtual machine files for a free program that allows you to create and run virtual machines WMWare Player (or for a paid analogue WMWare Workstation. Such formats are probably not known to beginners, but most understand, for example, what kind of formats such as "JPG" (images), "AVI" (video), "MP3" (audio).
By clicking on one of the file formats, at the bottom of the program it will become clearly visible how these files are distributed across hard drives, how many of them and the total volume compared to others. To do this, each file format has its own color. For example, on the right, I chose the format ".mov" (1). and below in the graphic video, these files began to be highlighted (2).
It is clearly seen that I have a lot of such files on my disks and they are all of such an average size. For comparison: much larger squares are displayed in green, but there are fewer of them.
These are the files of the created virtual machines ".vmdk". Large squares because these files themselves are much larger than the video ".mov" files on my computer, but they are fewer in number, since the number of green squares is much smaller.
Hovering over one of the squares, the path to the file, which is indicated by this square, will be displayed at the bottom of the program window, which is also very convenient. For example, you can immediately see where the largest files are located on my computer.
Conclusion
I think that everyone who uses a computer very actively, regularly fills in some data, will appreciate the convenience of analyzing disks through the WinDirStat program. As one may say, the built-in Windows tools cannot give such a convenient representation of the files and folders located on the computer. But through WinDirStat you can see everything very clearly, and most importantly, it’s clear literally right away, that is, you don’t have to understand the program for a long time. And the coolest thing is that the program does not need to be configured, because by default everything is configured, in my opinion, ideally, that is, all the necessary information is displayed.
Have a nice day and good mood! :)
