When it comes to upgrading my operating system, I’ve always been a fan of the clean slate. That way you can be sure nothing remains of the previous installation, providing some protection against future hiccups. However, if you were running the Technical Preview of Windows 10 and just took the plunge to the final release, you might be missing a few gigabytes of drive space.
This post was originally published on Lifehacker Australia.
A warning first: It’s usually not a good idea to go deleting files and folders from your OS drive without making backups. However, if you’re cautious and don’t wipe anything important, you can often get away scot-free… and in this case, with some disk space.
Martin Brinkmann at gHacks recently discovered a folder named “RecoveryImage” in the root of his C: drive. In his case, the directory was hogging a hefty 27GB and didn’t seem to serve any outward purpose, despite the suggestive name.
After backing up his drive, he proceed to delete the folder — with no ill effects. While Brinkmann wasn’t sure of the purpose of “RecoveryImage”, a post on Microsoft’s Technet forum revealed the following:
This is result of recovery image, which should be used for Windows 10 Technical Preview.
Clearly, the first part goes without saying, but knowing the source of the folder is rather helpful. So, as long as you’re happy with your Windows 10 upgrade, this folder should be safe to remove. Of course, the space you recover will be dependent on how big your previous install was, but in some cases it could net you a healthy number of gigabytes.
[gHacks]