win 11 take up more space after every update

win 11 ttake up more space after every update ,space allocted is shown in the screenshots attached. Please advice how to reduced space. Because the space taken is more than that of actual windows installed filed, and the windows 11 is updated on regular basis.

Why do you need to reduce space ?

What you are showing is normal and will increase on such things as Windows updates, application installs, external hardware, temporary files etc. Also there is a temporary large increase during the version updates, after 10 days the old version folder is automatically deleted, though you can do this manually sooner if required.

Basically you buy hardware and have a sufficiently large system partition to make sure the small increases are not significant.

I'm sure there is a tutorial on this forum to reduce that space, but you need to be careful, gains will be small.

I think @asadermo makes a valid point over ongoing bloat with each update.

Looking back on Macrium Disk Images and I see:

April DEV build clean installed and fully configured with my files and other programs @42GB

May Dev Build @44GB

Build 26120.961 @46GB
Build 26120.1330 @46GB
Build 26120.1340 @47GB
Build 26120.1350 @48GB

All above made after updating, restarting and having had a full disk clean run. The above sizes are Macrium files and so compressed. Latest 48GB file is a 72GB install.

Mooly said:

I think @asadermo makes a valid point over ongoing bloat with each update.

Looking back on Macrium Disk Images and I see:

April DEV build clean installed and fully configured with my files and other programs @42GB

May Dev Build @44GB

Build 26120.961 @46GB
Build 26120.1330 @46GB
Build 26120.1340 @47GB
Build 26120.1350 @48GB

All above made after updating, restarting and having had a full disk clean run. The above sizes are Macrium files and so compressed. Latest 48GB file is a 72GB install.

Click to expand...

Remember that there is an expected increase in space over time. This article makes note of this fact:


In that same article is a discussion of setting Windows to "CompactOS" mode. I have a laptop that has only 32GB of storage (!). After an installation of Windows using CompactOS I still have 6+ GB of space. Yes, that does shrink by a couple of GB in no time at all, but then I simply use cleanmgr with the sageset and sagerun switches to free up some of that space again.

That same article discusses other items that take up space such as logs, cache, VSS, system restore points, etc. so maybe that will give you some ideas of things that you can alter to save space.

Note that you can turn on/off CompactOS at will so feel free to experiment to see how much space it saves you.

EDIT: I should clarify that even if you did not install Windows with CompactOS enabled, you can turn it on or off even after Windows is installed.

Follow-up: In the article I noted in my earlier post I just noticed that you can run this command to reduce the size of the hibernation file by 30%:

powercfg /h /type reduced

I tried it on my machine with 32 GB storage and it increased my free space by just a tiny bit over 3 GB.

Updates will always use more space. Not only does space increase due to the updates themselves, but space is also increased as rollback ability has to be stored on the drive as well for successful uninstall of an update.

hsehestedt said:

Remember that there is an expected increase in space over time. This article makes note of this fact:

Click to expand...

Thanks for all the info, I'll have a good read of the link although I suspect I'll keep things as they are, at least on my main PC. Interesting though, thanks

Use following command from Admin Command Prompt to clean up the Component Store (WinSxS folder) to reduce its size which will delete backup of updates that is used to uninstall updates.

Mooly said:

I suspect I'll keep things as they are, at least on my main PC.

Click to expand...

Understood. I just figured that it never hurts to have options available