For a couple of years, I have been frustrated by the lack of space on my Windows PC C: Drive. This is a custom-built PC which uses a 111Gb SSD (solid state drive) for Windows. What’s frustrating is that Windows 10 doesn’t take much space, I load all applications to another drive, but my C: drive has less than 1Gb of free space. Despite this and my uninstalling all applications, it seems to fill up and run out of space at least once a week.
Over this last weekend, I finally managed to solve the problem and what I found came as a complete surprise. Without any impact on my system I was able to delete almost 40Gb of unused files, many of which were duplicates.
The first space saving I made was by turning off the sleep or hibernation mode in Windows. It turned out that Windows had created a huge 16Gb hibernation file despite me never using this feature. I always shut down my PC so this is wasted space for me.
The other savings all came by deleting unwanted, duplicate files that were left behind when upgrading my photography software. The main culprits were Adobe, Topaz, Alien Skin, Capture One and On1. If you think I’m singling these companies out, I’m not. Every software vendor seems to use the same approach and leave unwanted duplicate files behind when upgrading. If you have been using any of these packages for more than a couple of releases, it’s possible you will have this issue.
If you want to know what I did to find and release so much space, I included full details in my December Lenscraft Newsletter. If you subscribe you will receive it by email or you can read it here once published.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Do you know if this is true for Macs as well? And if so, how do you ferret out the duplicates?
I have done a search for “WinDirStat for Mac” on Google and Disk Inventory X looks almost identical (but a lot slower). WinDirStat is the software I used on my PC. I ran it on my Mac and I can see the same problem with duplicate files. I also noticed my Lightroom catalogue is 100Gb (gulp). The process to find the duplicate files is just the same as I describe in the article.
I don’t know if it’s true for Windows, but I found multi-GB Lightroom backups going back years recently. It seems that LR doesn’t incrementally add to one backup, but creates a new one each time.
Hi Tim. Yes, it’s exactly the same on Windows and Mac. Each time you click that button that says back up the Lightroom catalogue, it creates a new copy. My catalogue is 90GB so I tend not to back it up very often. It’s a good idea to remove these if they are on your main drive.