WDS shows a certain item labelled “<Unknown>” and recently someone posted a comment asking for details:
- What Does Windirstat Do
- How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Windows 7
- How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Download
- How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Hard Drive
- How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Iphone
In the example below, I have selected one of the larger files of a unused virtual machine. By using WinDirStat I realized its existence. Thanks to this I can, for example, archive the machine on an external disk, freeing up space from the computer disk. Removing old system drivers. WinDirStat visualization gives me another great advantage. Qi macros for excel 2010 free download. If you are in Windows 7/8/10 and want to delete the Windows.old folder, the process is fairly straightforward. First, open Disk Cleanup via the Start Menu (click Start and type in disk cleanup) and when the dialog pops up, choose the drive that has the.old files on it and click OK. This is normally just the C drive. WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows. Apr 30, 2018 The WinDirStat tool. If you really want to find out where all of your hard disk space has gone, a much better tool to use is a free third-party software program called WinDirStat. Incidentally, there is also a Linux version called KDirStat, and a Mac version called QDirStat. As soon as you identify the space-hoggers on your PC, right-click on them and select Delete to Recycle Bin for later disposal or Delete (no way to undelete) for permanent deletion. Ideally, you should use this tool once a month to clean up any files that you no longer need.
i think it would be nice to put in the faq or in help or in some docs what’s in the <unknown> space
sometimes it’s an huge amount of space! like 700 or more MB ! i think it could be the “system volume information” but! Pixlr offline. what mysterous things are within this space? he he he!
This mysterious item is just the difference between what Windows reports as the free space on the volume minus size of the files WDS can access. Please note the part WDS can access! This is the important point here. WDS cannot access the files under
System Volume Information
on all the (NTFS?) drives, so it cannot sum up the sizes of these items. And by the way, we have had reports of up to 30 GB of “<Unknown>” space.Now what is stored in this directory? If you could gain
SYSTEM
access (and I will not tell you how that is possible …), you would see that the system keeps some binary log files there, but these take up only a small portion of what is stored in there. The biggest portion is usually being taken up by the System Restore Points (SRPs) you can create (or that are automatically created by software installers). The contents are a dump of the registry at the time the SRP was taken and of relevant files (usually from the system folders). I personally turned this feature of since I have a different backup strategy – however, this may not apply to everyone, so you’ll have to live with the “<Unknown>” item :mrgreen:.There also have been reports that some third-party software stores data there, but I cannot confirm this. Also in the very unlikely case that your file system is corrupt there may be a non-zero sized “<Unknown>” item. In that latter case run a file system check and the problems should be fixed afterwards.
// Oliver
PS: If you run under a non-privileged account this could also cause a lot of files to be inaccessible and therefore to count as “<Unknown>” …
Windirstat is a tool used to list, print disk, file, and folder size and related statistics on Windows operating systems. Actually, Windirstat is a clone of the Kdirstat which is developed for Linux distributions for KDE desktop environment where the
K
came from. The latest version of the WinDirStat is 1.1.2.80 which is released January 28, 2019. Windirstat can also clean up different types of files and directories easily. As stated Windirstat is the alternative for the KDirStat or QDirStat in Linux, Disk Inventory or GrandPerspective in MacOSX.
Features
We will examine the features of WinDirStat in detail below but here is a shortlist for the features of the WinDirStat.
- Support for most of the operating systems like Linux, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Windows, MacOS
- Coloring of the file types and extensions
- Graphics to show file sizes
- Listing file and folders with their sizes with tree scheme
- Providing information like usage percentage, size, file, and attributes
Download WinDirStat
WinDirStat can be downloaded from the main site and also mirrors like FossHub, SourceForge, and Triple. Below you can select one of the links to download WinDirStat. For this case, we will select
Latest installer
which is version 1.1.2.Install WinDirStat
We will use regular
Next
and Next
install steps. When we click the setup file we will see following screen first.What Does Windirstat Do
In the second screen, we will see the following screen where some installation options are provided. We can set or unset to create a desktop shortcut, languages etc.
In this step, we will specify the installation destination folder which is
C:Program FilesWinDirStat
.Following screen the final step of the WinDirStat installation where we can run it by checking
Run WinDirStat
checkbox.Scanning Drive and Folders
In order to print some information about the drive, directory, and files we need to scan specified drives, directories and files. We can scan for 3 different type which is
All Local Drives
where all currently connected drives will be scanned.Individual Drives
will scan only specified drives or partitions like C: or D: etc.A Folder
will scan the only specified folder.
File and Director Scan Results
When the scan is completed we will see a screen like below. There is 3 pane where directory list, file extensions and graphics are displayed. In this first pane following information is provided.
Name
of the directorySubtree Percentage
is the total size of the specified directoryPercentage
is the percentage of the specified directory according to its size to the partitionSize
is the size of the given file or directoryItems
is the total count of the files and directories which resides given directorySubdirs
is the total count of the only sub-directoriesLast Chance
is the last chance of the given file or directory
In the second pane following information about file extension or types and size is provided.
Extension
is the extension of the given files like.dll
, .exeetc
Color
is the color of the given file type or extensionDescription
is the extended name of the description of the given file type or extensionBytes
is the total size of the given extension or type of all files
The last pane which resides in the bottom of the two panes will provide a graphical representation of all file and directory types. The colors used to represent different files and file extensions or types.
As an example, we can see that
Windows
directory is the biggest directory where its size is 7.7 GB in this example and contains 55,479 items where 46,421 of them are files and 9,058 of them are subdirectories.Delete File or Directory
During the file and directory size inspection, we can find some unneeded files in order to delete or remove. We can delete these files and directories from the WinDirStat directly. There are 3 ways to delete a file or directory. First, we can right-click to the file or directory we want to delete which will open a menu which contains two
Delete
option.Delete (to Recycle Bin)
will delete given file or directory and send to the Recycle BinDelete (no way to undelete)
will as its explanation suggest where files and directories will be deleted where there will be no undelete option.
We can also use keyboard shortcuts
Del
will delete and send it to the recycle bin.Shift+Del
will delete directly.
We can also use the toolbar where there are two icons like below.
How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Windows 7
WinDirStat Alternatives In Windows
How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Download
Even WinDirStat provides greate features there are some alternative which are very usefull like WinDirStat too. Below we will list some alternatives which provides similar functions to the WinDirStat.
How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Hard Drive
SpaceSniffer
provides similar functions to the WinDirStat where big difference is SpaceSniffer does not contains directory list. But SpaceSniffer provides more useful GUI than the WinDirStat. How To Use Windirstat To Clean Up Iphone
TreeSize
is another alternative to WinDirStat. TreeSize provides simpler user interface and usage. Twilight breaking dawn torrent. It provides most of the WinDirStat features but doesn’t have extension. TreeSize has modern looking ribbon-style interface which makes it more stylish on the Windows 10. TreeSize has 3 versions where TreeSize Free
comes without a cost and TreeSize Personal
and TreeSize Professional
provides more features for a cost.