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

File size listing windows

This forum has migrated to Microsoft Q&A. Visit Microsoft Q&A to post new questions.

Answered by:

Question

Hi, I am looking for a Windows command or tool to list file sizes larger than a specified size. I thought FORFILES could help me, but I am not sure it can do the job.

A folder with a large number of subfolders and files, and an easy way to find the largest files searching all subdirectories, and listing up those files taking up much space.

Answers

Just try following command. I have tested it on my side.

forfiles /p d:\new /s /m *.* /c «cmd /c if @fsize gtr 100000 echo @file»

Hope that helps

TechNet Community Support

All replies

Post if this solve you problem!

You can use «Dir /S», with this parameter you can search all files in Subfolders. complementing, you can add «Sortorder S» to filter by size of the file.

Follow the example;

Dir /S *Framework sortorder S

Basically , I went into the directory C : \ Windows and search all files with » frame» in its name , filtering by size.

Not exactly what I was looking for unfortunately.

I need the list of the directories and files with the filesize on the largest files, lets say 100 MB as an example of the search criteria

I tried the following command:

forfiles /p c:\test /s /m *.* /c «cmd /c if @fsize>>100000 echo @fsize is a file of 100 MBs»

List files with path and file size only in Command Line

Windows Command Line (or maybe PowerShell).

How can I list all files, recursively, with full path and filesize, but without anything else and export to a .txt file. Much preferably a code that works for whichever current directory I am in with the Command Line (so does not require manual entering of the target directory).

None of these provides path\filename and filesize only:

Desired output (fullpath\file.ext filesize):

6 Answers 6

earlier PowerShell versions:

zA) > filelist.txt – user3026965 May 11 ’17 at 20:55

zA) > filelist.txt does not perform in large subdir trees. tried 1 TB/100K files, kept running for hours until i terminated with ctrl c. still works on small dir trees. – user3026965 May 12 ’17 at 4:56

zA >>filelist.txt – user6811411 May 12 ’17 at 7:08

OP’s chosen answer using PowerShell (and their comment that they used Get-ChildItem -Recurse | select Length,LastWriteTime,FullName | Format-Table -Wrap -AutoSize | Out-File filelist.txt ) was almost what I wanted for processing in Excel. Thanks for that part.

Unfortunately, (as they mentioned) the output had wrapped lines for long file paths, which isn’t quite what I wanted.

The following command will produce a CSV formatted file (no wrapped lines):

The following removes the wrapping issue you have:

Folder Size Explorer — Free Windows Explorer with folder sizes.

Folder Size is a freeware tool that will scan and list folder sizes on your computer, print folder sizes or print files list.

Supported OS: Windows 10 / Windows 8 / Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows XP / Windows 98 including x86 and x64 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems.

Supported server OS: Windows Server 2003 / Home Server / Server 2008 / EBS 2008 / HPC Server 2008 / Server 2008 R2 / Home Server 2011 / Server 2012 / MultiPoint Server / Small Business Server

Download Folder Size

Share this great free tool — Your friends will thank you!

Organizing the data in your system can be a real pain in the long run. Data tends to get accumulated in every system, regardless of the type of use that it is put to. And users almost always ignore the steady accumulation and fail to organize it in due time. This leads to an overflow of data, which ultimately leads to a crisis.

For the ones among you who can relate to this, Folder Size is the right software for you. Folder Size is a freeware, its superb simplicity will make you fall in love with the software.

Folder Size analyzes your hard drives space and checks your files and folders and displays exactly how much space each file and folder is occupying.

Download Folder Size

This application hardly occupies any space on the hard drive, it is really compact, fast and also very efficient.
The application displays how much space each file and folder is occupying exactly, on top of this, the application also displays the total percentage of the disk space the files and folders occupy, so it shows the amount of disk space it is occupying and also the percentage.

It displays a report which shows the files and folders which occupy the maximum space first and the ones which occupy lesser space after that, it basically displays them in descending order, starting from the maximum.

When the report is shown, you can easily see which folders are occupying the maximum space as Folder Size also scans the sub folders, yet another bonus that is sure to leave you gaping in awe.

Folder Size scans your entire hard drive in just a few minutes due to its optimized scan algorithms, it also has the another feature, which is its progressive scan which lets you continue the scan right from the point of interruption.
This application is not feature rich, but really simple and displays your hard disk space in the Windows Explorer. Folder Size is a software which is really easy to use.

Download Folder Size

In order to save time, you can also scan particular folders instead of the entire hard drive. Folder Size also keeps a track of which folders you view and scan in the background of the Windows Explorer. It is very useful in the disk cleanup process.

Once you get used to having all the directory sizes and other information there, a directory listing looks very incomplete and odd without it. The application comes with options for deleting specific files and folders, and also listing the various folders present in a very comprehensive way. It also has charting options, something that cannot be found in any other software.