How to find the largest files?

The freeware Largest Files Finder finds the 100 largest files on your hard disk or within multiple subdirectories. Once you start Largest Files Finder, the software automatically scans your hard drive and shows you the top 100 biggest files on your hard disk. For each file you see the following information in the top 100 largest files list: file name, full folder path, file size and date of last change. If you need more free disk space, simply run that freeware and see what files can be deleted to get more free disk space.

You can select any hard drive or any folder you want. The file finder software starts automatically to scan your selected disk or folder. Largest Files Finder only needs 60 seconds for a complete 200 GB disk scan.

Features

• doesn’t require installation
• doesn’t require runtime modules
• doesn’t write to the registry
• doesn’t modify files outside of its own directories
• isn’t adware
• 100% free — just remember it comes from file.net 🙂

System requirements

• Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP or Windows Server
• only 0.6 MB free disk space

What else takes up a lot of space?

Videos, photos and music folders often take up the most space. It’s best to back these up to an external hard drive or in the cloud. Music, audio books or language courses no longer need to be stored as MP3 files on your PC or smartphone. Music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music or Audible are meant to be more convenient!

How do I find the largest files on my PC in Windows 10?

• Sometimes, you need to free up some space by removing large, unused files.
• The two quick tips listed below will surely be of great help to you.
• If you want to use less storage space, find some inspiration in our File Management Hub.
• For 24-hour professional guidance, don’t hesitate to bookmark this Tech Tutorials Hub.

• Find files on your PC, laptop and other devices
• Locate themin multiple places: local, network or cloud storage
• Get back pretty much everything you lost at a snap

find all the files,
even in cloud and network

Is your laptop’s or desktop’s hard drive more than 75% full? If so, you need to free up some hard drive space.

Erasing temporary files with disk cleaner software tools is one convenient way to free up some storage space.

Alternatively, you can free up hard drive storage by manually deleting some of your largest files.

To do that, you’ll just need to find the largest files on your PC ‘s hard drive first. We’re here to help you out with that.

How do I search for files by size in Windows 10?

1. Use a third-party tool

A dedicated file finder tool such as Copernic Desktop Search will help you with the utmost accuracy to find documents depending on your needs.

The tool comes with a Refine search feature to allow you to dig deep into the computer files and get exactly what you’re looking for.

As a result, you can search a file by:

Copernic comes in several subscription versions, including a free one, that has some limitations, in terms of the file types it retrieves.

However, you can rest assured that the most popular ones ( such as Office files, Outlook emails, and attachments, text documents, archived, and multimedia files ) are covered.

After finding the largest files, in case you need to keep some of them, you can still free up HDD space by moving the files from your hard drive into Google Drive or OneDrive cloud storage.

Copernic Desktop Search

2. Use File Explorer

1. Press the File Explorer button on the Windows 10 taskbar.
2. Select your C: drive or an alternative drive partition to search for files on. (Alternatively, you can select a specific folder to search for files in.)
3. Click inside the Search box to the right of Explorer’s window to open the Search tab.
4. Select the All subfolders option.
5. Click the Size button to open the drop-down menu shown below.
6. Select the Gigantic (>128 MB) option to search for the largest files. (File Explorer will then list all files that eclipse 128 MB within your selected directory or drive.)
7. Press the Type button to further modify your search.
8. Select to search for a more specific file type, such as image, music, or video.
9. Erase files by selecting them and pressing the Delete button.
10. Select the Empty Recycle Bin option in the Recycle Bin to erase the deleted files.

Although many users utilize Cortana to search in Windows 10, File Explorer remains the best built-in utility for file searching.

So, if you don’t want to go for a dedicated tool, Explorer is a decent Windows file manager with numerous search options.

You can find your PC’s largest files with the options on Explorer’s Search tab, simply as described in the procedure above.

You might find that some of your desktop’s or laptop’s largest files are system files in subfolders within the Windows folder. Never delete any large file that might be a system file.

If you’re not sure whether a file is a system one or not, do not erase it. Stick to deleting the largest image, video, document, and other files within your user folder.

File Explorer might also find large program (EXE) files. Don’t delete program files from within Explorer as they’ll probably be listed within the Programs and Features Control Panel applet.

The Windows 10 tips detailed in this useful post will also free up more hard drive space.

Let us know if you managed to achieve your goal in the comments area below.

How to find large files

In Windows, if one wants to find which files are consuming most of the space on the disk, it can be found easily using explorer. Just sort list of the files based on the size attribute. But what if we need to find the large sized files from command line? How can we do this?

We can find this using windows commands, without needing any third party tools.В We can do this using forfiles command.

Find files with size of 1 MB or more.

This command prints the complete file path. If you need to print just the file name, you can use @file in place of @path.

Command to find files with size of more than 100MB

Find files with size 1 GB or more.

As shown above, this command allows us to find files having size more than a given value. It’s not useful if someone wants to find the largest 10 files in a folder. I could not find a way to do this using windows native commands. If you know of any way to do this, please let others know by adding comment below.

When running it from the root of a server I get “Error: The filename or extension is too long.” message.

I have not yet, but I will try running is several folder in from a data share.
I also created a batch file to run it and where I placed the bat was not in the path, so I had to precede the command with the path. I also changed from *.txt to *.* as I want to see all files over a gig in size.
Thanks!

Thanks. I updated the commands to consider all file types.

What should be the command to find top ‘x’ files. For example, I need to find top 10 big files on my system.

works, but only searches the current user profile. can it search every user profile?

If you run the command from C:\, you can search across all user profiles.

The path you entered, is too long. Enter a shorter path
File Name could not be found. Check the spelling of the filename,
and verify that the file location is correct.

That’s powershell… not Command Prompt.

For those wanting top 10 files, redirect output to a text file such as
forfiles /S /M * /C “cmd /c if @fsize GEQ 1073741824 echo @path > bigfiles.txt”

You can then open in excel and sort or use text editor to weed out the files you don’t want

Better to run command prompt as an administrator, elevated command prompt.

What if I want to get all the folders with a total size greater than 100Mb ?

Large sizes don’t works well. If you try files beq 16106127360 (15GB), for example, the command don’t works fine.

Hello,
On my Win10 1809 April 3, 2019, the code by OP fails because IF is testing strings no integers.
Place % on each side of strings to force an integer compare.
e.g.
forfiles /S /M * /C “cmd /c if %@fsize% GEQ %1048576% echo @path”

I had to use the following to find files larger than 5GB.
forfiles /S /M *.mp4 /C “cmd /c if %@fsize% geq %5368709120% echo @[email protected]”

The following shows my results without the integer conversions. Excamaitions added to mark the incorrect finds.
G:> forfiles /S /M *.mp4 /C “cmd /c if @fsize GEQ 5177382727 echo @file – @fsize”

“16.52.34.01-trim.mp4” – 6277215671
“16.52.34.01-m.mp4” – 3071602259 !!
“15.47.35.01.mp4” – 5568346966
“16.03.45.02.mp4” – 5177382727
“17.03.06.03.mp4” – 10017167364
“17.38.29.05.mp4” – 5095886996
“18.24.25.07.mp4” – 6714514328
“18.49.21.08.mp4” – 2207037683 !!
“19.28.46.01.mp4” – 3932554504 !!

When I run forfiles /S /M * /C “cmd /c if @fsize GEQ 1073741824 echo @path”, command gives me the following message ERROR: The filename or extension is too long.

I had success with the original command. However, it only gives me the path and file name. I’d like to see the size of each file. Is there a switch for that?

4 Ways To Find Large Files In Windows 10

Free up space quickly by deleting them

If you quickly want to free-up memory space on your Windows machine, the best way to do that is to find large files on your Windows 10 PC and get rid of them if they’re no longer useful. The question though is how do you go about searching for large files on your computer?

Windows provides you with multiple ways to find all the large files that are stored in your drives. Either you can use the built-in tools on your machine to look for these files or you can grab a third-party app that will do the task for you. Either way, you’ll find the files that occupy a significant portion of your memory space.

Once such files are found, it’s then up to you what you want to do with them. If deleting them permanently isn’t something you’d like to do straightaway, you can move them over to a cloud storage or to an external hard drive.

Also, be sure to check out our YouTube video from our sister site Online Tech Tips where we go through some of the options mentioned below in this article.

Find Large Files In Windows 10 Using File Explorer

File Explorer comes with a lot of hidden features to let you organize, sort, and find files on your computer. One of its abilities is to help you find files that are of specific size on your computer. Using this feature, you can locate those memory-hogging files and get them removed from your PC.

Before you do that, though, you’ll need to first enable the hidden files option. This is to ensure that Explorer looks for large hidden files as well in addition to searching for the normal files.

However, be cautious while dealing with the hidden files. Most of the time, these are system and app related files which, if you delete, will cause your apps to malfunction and even lead your entire system to crash. Before you delete anything, just make sure you know what it is and you’ll be fine.

Open the Start Menu and search for Show hidden and click on Show hidden files and folders.

When the dialog box opens, click on the View tab at the top. You’ll see various File Explorer options that you can modify.

Find the option that says Show hidden files, folders, and drives and put a checkmark in it. Then click on the OK button to save your changes.

Double-click on This PC on your desktop to launch File Explorer. When the utility launches, click on the search box given at the top-right corner.

A new menu item will be added to the top of your screen. Click on the newly added item that says Search to view further options.

Select the Size option and then select an appropriate option from the list. It’ll let you find large files available on your PC.

If what you consider as a large file isn’t available in the default menu, type in size:>1GB (replace 1GB with your size) in the search box and hit Enter. It’ll only look for the files that are larger than your specified size.

When the search results appear, right-click anywhere blank and select Sort by followed by Size and Descending. This’ll ensure the largest file is shown at the top of the results.

Search For Large Files In Windows 10 With Command Prompt

If you’re more of a geeky person, you can use the Command Prompt utility to retrieve a list of all the files larger than a specified size value. The files list can be exported to a text file for you to then actually find those files on your machine.

Press Windows + R, type in cmd, and hit Enter to launch the utility.

When it launches, type in the following command and hit Enter. It’ll find all the files that are larger than 1GB in size. You can modify the value in the command so it finds files that you think are large.

forfiles /S /M * /C “cmd /c if @fsize GEQ 1073741824 echo @path > largefiles.txt

Open the newly created largefiles.txt file and it’ll have a list of all the large files sitting on your computer.

Use Largest Files Finder To Find Large Files On Windows 10

File Explorer and Command Prompt aren’t the only tools to find large files on your Windows 10 computer. There are a few third-party apps as well that can help you find such files.

Largest Files Finder is one of those apps that helps you find the top 100 largest files on your computer. It claims to be only taking a minute to scan drives sized upto 200GB. Also, it doesn’t require any installation and works straight out of the box.

• Download and launch the app on your computer.
• Soon as it launches, it automatically starts searching for large files on your computer. When it’s done, you can review the results for yourself.

If you want to delete any files from the search results, you can do so with ease from within the app. Simply right-click on any of the files and select Delete.

Find Largest Files On Windows 10 With TreeSize Free

TreeSize Free has been around for quite a long time and it helps you find space hogging files on your Windows computers. It requires a small installation but then it works like a charm.

• Download, install, and launch the app on your computer. Make sure to run it with admin rights so it can search the folders that it can’t otherwise.
• You’ll see a tree of your folders along with the space they occupy on your screen. You can double-click on any folder to view its subfolders and their sizes.

You can then sort the directories by the Size column so that the largest files are always shown at the top.

It has a few customizable options as well should you want to use them. Feel free to play around with any options you think will make it easier to find large files on your computer.

Mahesh has been obsessed with technology since he got his first gadget a decade or so ago. Over the last few years, he’s written a number of tech articles on various online publications including but not limited to MakeTechEasier and Android AppStorm. Read Mahesh’s Full Bio