Windows Might Be Wasting 500GB of Your Storage. Here’s How to Check
If your main boot drive is full to the brim, you might be able to shave off half a terabyte. Many Windows 11 machines have been affected by an issue in which a specific file consumes up to 500GB of storage, according to Windows Latest. Microsoft has since released a fix, but if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you might have a lot of wasted storage space you can recover.
The problem reportedly stems from a wonky Capability Access Manager, or rather, the write log for its database. Windows uses that to track application compatibility and privacy-related access, like your camera, microphone, and location. But in some cases, this file is not being wiped and is instead growing exponentially until it fills the system drive it’s on.
Really, this file should be at most several megabytes, but in some cases it’s been found to occupy hundreds of gigabytes.
If this is in the hundreds of gigabytes, you might want to grab the update.
Credit: Jon Martindale
To see if you’re affected by this bug, navigate to Settings > Storage > Show more categories > System & Reserved, then check how much “System files” occupies at the top of the screen. It should be a few tens of gigabytes at most. If it’s in the hundreds, you may be impacted.
You can also find the problematic file yourself by navigating to C: > ProgramData > Microsoft > Windows > CapabilityAccessManager. You should find a database file there. If it’s overblown, it’ll be obvious from the file size.
The easiest fix is to install Windows 11 KB5095093 from Windows Update, or wait for the next Patch Tuesday release in July, when the fix will roll out to everyone automatically.
“This update improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file,” Microsoft said in its recent release notes. There’s no explanation about why the problem occurred, but it’s good to see it’s been fixed with such alacrity.
