Windows: Free up some disk space on your SSD

It’s not a secret that SSD drives on many desktops and laptops have no enough space. And if you wish to free up some space you have a non obvious trick.

AppData \ Roaming

There is a special directory in Windows which contains some user’s profiles and programs preferences. And this directory is so large!

C:\Users\{{username}}\AppData\Roaming

Ta-dam! Take a look at that— my Roaming directory was bigger then 40 Gb (in most because of Unity3D extensions)!

So open a folder Properties (right click), find Location tab and move folder to your second drive by clicking on Move button. But before it, close all your programs!

There is a possibility of losing some preferences of your programs, but finally it’s not a problem to set it up again.

I got an error when I try to move Roaming folder and my workaround was in copying this folder to a new destination. And only after that I changed Location without next-step moving.

New destination of my Roaming folder now is:

D:\Users\{{username}}\AppData\Roaming

After that procedure reboot your computer and delete old folder (make a backup before!) and then (if you want to play it safe) reboot again.

If some folders at previous destination of Roaming folder have not been deleted because of privelegies error, try delete all folders inside besides Microsoft folder.

Swap File

Our next step is to change Windows swap-file destination. Swap-file is located on disk C by default and it’s size managed by Windows without your control.

You should set “No paging file” for disk C (SSD), and set “System managed” for disk D because it have much more disk space.

Then reboot your system.