My D Drive is being taken up by "other" files. What could this be and how can I clean it up?

Question

I've had this Laptop for a few years now and have recently noticed my recovery drive is almost full due to some files in the "other" category that I can't seem to access, anybody know what this could be and how I could free up some space?

• CPU: AMD Quad Core A6-7310
• Ram: 4GB
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Memory/Storage:500 GB 5400 rpm Sata

Answer 1

As a Recovery partition its purpose is to be as small as possible whilst containing sufficient to restore your machine to its initial shipped state, in case of emergency or before selling it on.
The whole partition is only 18GB.

As such, it is likely to be crammed full of compressed system files which can be deployed by the Recovery process when needed. They don't need to be anything recognisable by your running system, so long as they can be deployed for Recovery.
The size should not change over time; it should remain as the manufacturer initially set it up.

Answer 2

"Other" means all files that cannot be categorized by Windows.

A double-click on it will show the list of the largest included folders, in descending order of size, with the exception of system files and perhaps also hidden folders (if you have any). Perhaps in your case these folders are not of a viewable type.

There is nothing wrong with a large "Other" section containing your files. On my computer its size is counted in terabytes and seems entirely correct.

The categorization as done by Windows is meaningless. When I double-click for example on my "Videos" section, Windows shows me folders that have nothing do with video. It also includes some folders in more than one category.

If you wish to analyze the disk space, better use a specialized product.

You may see a list of such free products with reviews in the article Best Free Disk Space Analyzer.

Answer 3

Try this: Windirstat See if you can view individual files.