System drive space doubled in size within the past month.

Again my thanks for the advice. Disabling reserved storage reduced it by 7Gb, So, now it's 31GB. But, I am considering restoring my first mirror.

Hello @RolandJS,

RolandJS said:

Paul, is Windows 10 reserved storage the same as Windows 7 system restore point storage?

Nice to see you.

No, this might explain it a bit better . . .

QUOTE from Tutorial:

How does it work?

When apps and system processes create temporary files, these files will automatically be placed into reserved storage. These temporary files won’t consume free user space when they are created and will be less likely to do so as temporary files increase in number, provided that the reserve isn’t full. Since disk space has been set aside for this purpose, your device will function more reliably. Storage sense will automatically remove unneeded temporary files, but if for some reason your reserve area fills up Windows will continue to operate as expected while temporarily consuming some disk space outside of the reserve if it is temporarily full.

I hope this helps.

Thanks, that will help us who did not know for sure before!

The bloat was caused by a series of the subsequent Windows updates. Tested this by reinstalling the 2020-11-06 version and let Windows update bring it up to date. It increased by 5+Gb.

Also, researched Macrium knowledge base. Macrium mirror does not contain any system cache (.sys) files, it just records their names.

[QUOTE=Paul Black;2157398] Hello @ineuw, Please look at TairikuOkami's suggestion above first, he makes a good point. /QUOTE]

I checked everything and the reserved storage is disabled. The bloat comes from Windows updates. Between January and now, the Windows installation bloated by 5Gb. I tested this by restoring the 2020-11-06 (version 2004 with all the Windows updates but no apps), and let Windows install all updates since 2020-11-06. The system installation expanded from 25Gb to 31Gb.

I brought up this issue because of the size and the time it takes Macrium to create to create a mirror, but I will post about it separately, tomorrow.

If because of Windows Update, try Disk cleanup, Cleanup System Files: see what's shown here:

Open and Use Disk Cleanup in Windows 10

and see
Clean Up Component Store (WinSxS folder) in Windows 10

As posted above, Wiztree (free) is very useful in identifying how your space is used.

Matthew Wai said:

Glary Utilities has Disk Space Analyzer.
A portable version: https://download.glarysoft.com/guportable.zip

Hey Matthew I downloaded that glarysoft file and it is a pretty neat little utility.....One question for you is I went to use the "Empty folders finder" and I'd have to say there was a few thousand empty folders after looking at the list so would it be ok to delete all of those empty folders then if my PC needs that specific folder it will probably create it again.....So deleting them will not screw-up anything on my PC.....Correct......Or if anybody else wants to give their advice please do so.

Let me know....Thanks!

Sometimes Windows fails to create folders (due to special ownerships/permissions) and then the depending features will fail. I learnt it the hard way, ever since I remove only files and never folders. But feel free to try it.