Windows 11 - drive getting full

[ladymuck]

+1 for cloning the harddrive. I've used EaseUS Partition Master

[NotAllThere]

It's a desktop machine. I have windows on C, install programs to D and have my data on E.

I dug a little deepar and found that the hiberfil.sys file was consuming almost 50GB. I don't use hibernation mode, so I just opened an adminstrator cmd, and typed powercfg -h -off hiberfil.sys file has now disappeared.

[Lance]

Use a backup tool. Acronis seems to work quite well.
Not tried the Windows backup tools for years but they got to be better than they used to be.

Take backup.
Swap disks.
Restore.
Find the license key and input (new hard disk = new system)

If you bought the system as Win10 and upgraded for free you might struggle with the original license key though.

[d000hg]

You need some disk cloning software and then it's a piece of cake. MacOs includes this for free and I was amazed how easy it was... find a tool and then it's largely a case of follow a little wizard.

Adding a second drive would be my preference if you have the spare space - migrate documents and applications to D: and let Windows have the old drive for itself.

I would echo DonD - I use WinDirStat to see where the storage has gone. Are you sure Windows hasn't got a full backup installed there in a secret bit or something?

[DealorNoDeal]

If it was me, I'd just move non Win OS stuff on to the SSD. This might make it easier to keep the important stuff backed up.

I'd look at the size of the folders under C:\ to identify big stuff that could be moved.

Win 11 is flabby but even it shouldn't need anywhere near 120Gb.

[malvolio]

New install or use something like Acronis and a temporary boot disk.

Alternatively, keep your current C: drive and park all your data on the SSD...

None of which applies if we're talking about laptops of course.

[sadkingbilly]

reinstall win11 on the new drive?
copy all user data off first of course.
PITA, but windoze is.

[NotAllThere]

So my C drive (SSD) is 120GB, and it's basically operating with 1-3GB free space. I've installed a 1TB M.2 SSD card, and it would be great if I could make it the C drive.

How?