Question About Free Space on the Recovery (D) Drive

This may be a stupid question, but I don't know much about computers and I'm concerned, so I have to at least ask about it. I just happened to look at how much space was on my C drive, because I was considering downloading all 800 photos from my pocket camera's SD card. That looked great, 854 GB free of 911 GB.

What I noticed was the Recover Image (D) amount, 2.29 GB free of 18.1 GB. This computer is only 3 months old, a HP desktop with Windows 10 factory installed. I have no idea why there is so little space left here, and I'm not aware of putting anything on the D drive.

Can someone tell me if this is normal? What's filling this up, and will it be completely full soon? If so, what do I do then? Any advice and information on this is appreciated. Is everyone's D drive as full as mine? Should I be worried?

Hi Bigfoot, I don't know much about HP Desktops but the Recovery Partition probably holds an image of you PC when it left the factory. It's there so that you can return it to the original new condition should you wish to do so. I doubt that it will grow in size anytime. If you take a look at the documentation that came with the PC it will probably confirm this.

That said, I hope you are backing up your important documents, images, etc to an external drive in case anything goes wrong with the OS. If not you need to think about an external drive. Imagine how you would feel if you had to restore your PC and lost all you pictures.

That is normal, (D:) is a Recovery partition used to restore your PC to the bought state. It is normally almost full. It never changes. Essentially it's your copy of Windows, manufacturers drivers, applications etc.

Manufacturers normally ask you to make a copy of that to DVDs or a USB key drive. So you can use that if say your HDD dies on which the recovery partition is.

I just leave it there, does not take much space.

SoFine409 said:

Hi Bigfoot, I don't know much about HP Desktops but the Recovery Partition probably holds an image of you PC when it left the factory. It's there so that you can return it to the original new condition should you wish to do so. I doubt that it will grow in size anytime. If you take a look at the documentation that came with the PC it will probably confirm this.

That said, I hope you are backing up your important documents, images, etc to an external drive in case anything goes wrong with the OS. If not you need to think about an external drive. Imagine how you would feel if you had to restore your PC and lost all you pictures.

Thank you so much SoFine, I was googling around and read something like that and was hoping that's what it was. So if I'm correct, no more should be added to the D file from now on?

There was no real documentation that came with this computer, I bought it at Walmart and was actually copying stuff off of the box before I threw it out so I'd have some info on it.

I have no important documents on my computer at all, and for years my practice was to take photos, like from vacations, and copy them to a CD, and save them that way. Other than that, I have never had any kind of a backup.

Helmut said:

That is normal, (D:) is a Recovery partition used to restore your PC to the bought state. It is normally almost full. It never changes. Essentially it's your copy of Windows, manufacturers drivers, applications etc.

Manufacturers normally ask you to make a copy of that to DVDs or a USB key drive. So you can use that if say your HDD dies on which the recovery partition is.

I just leave it there, does not take much space.

Thanks for your reply Helmut, I do feel better now. :)

Bigfoot said:

Thank you so much SoFine, I was googling around and read something like that and was hoping that's what it was. So if I'm correct, no more should be added to the D file from now on?

There was no real documentation that came with this computer, I bought it at Walmart and was actually copying stuff off of the box before I threw it out so I'd have some info on it..

That Recovery Image will not grow. If it did it would not restore the original, snapshot in time, when you PC left the factory.

You can go to the HP web site and find the documentation for your specific model. Dell puts a unique service tag number on each PC that will show you everything you need to know about your PC, including replacement parts. I suspect that HP being a major brand, might do the same thing.

Thanks again for the info SoFine.