Deleting Deleting Windows.old folder If you have recently upgraded to Windows 11 22H2 , you will find that you have much less free space on your storage drive. The same happens if you have upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11. So, we start looking for what we can delete to recover the lost space and we come across a suspicious folder called Windows old.
The Windows old directory stores the previous version of the operating system and allows us to undo the upgrade (called a rollback) in case there is a problem. In fact, this folder should be automatically deleted 10 days after updating, which is the time limit that Windows sets to rollback.
Can we remove Windows.old in any way?
Is it possible to delete this folder like any other directory on our PC? Yes, but we should NOT. In fact, it is possible that we encounter several errors during its deletion and that Windows 11 does not finish deleting all the files.
Therefore, we should not delete Windows old as if it were any folder. If we have verified that we do not have any errors after updating our operating system, we can get rid of that directory by following a simple procedure recommended by Microsoft.
The steps to delete the Windows.old folder are as follows:
1.We open the Run window with the key combination Windows + R.
2.Type cleanmgr.exe and click OK.
3.Once Disk Cleanup opens, click on Clean up system files.
4.Check the Previous Windows installations box and click OK.
The process can take some time, because it has to delete a lot of files and undo the registry keys that make Windows 11 rollback possible.
Once the process is finished, we will see how we will have recovered between 5 and 30 GB depending on the enabled features, third-party applications and customizations that we have added to the operating system. Also, we can take advantage of Disk Cleanup to check if we have a large number of temporary files that we can delete.
