Question Removing temporary files from storage ?

[mohan-hardware]

Is it safe to delete this 28GB of data !

https://imgur.com/a/vvmF2pd

View: https://imgur.com/a/vvmF2pd

 

[Lutfij]

Just make sure you've backed up mission critical data off of your old OS installation drive/part, before running that trimming option in the OS.

Simple answer, yes you're good to go.

 

[BFG-9000]

Yes, if you are sure you won't be reverting to a previous build or feature update of Windows. Usually they only contain superseded system files and not anything from user data folders.

In recent Windows, those Windows.old files are supposed to be automatically deleted after ten days anyway. 10 years ago in early Windows 10 builds it was 30 days, and people still complained when they were no longer able to revert to Windows 7 or 8.1. Presumably Microsoft is more confident now that you will love it, or that later updates that break Windows will do so more noticeably so you'll know it right away.

 

[mohan-hardware]

Yes, if you are sure, you won't be reverting to a previous build or feature update of Windows. Usually they only contain superseded system files and not anything from user data folders.

In recent Windows, those Windows.old files are supposed to be automatically deleted after ten days anyway. 10 years ago in early Windows 10 builds it was 30 days, and people still complained when they were no longer able to revert to Windows 7 or 8.1. Presumably Microsoft is more confident now that you will love it, or that later updates that break Windows will do so more noticeably so you'll know it right away.

This is a 4-month-old new PC that came with Windows 11 Professional installed.
So how come this much data of superseded Windows files?
I never installed Windows 7, 8 or 10.

 

[BFG-9000]

If you are on Windows 11 24H2, then the previous build of Windows these superseded files could be from is either Windows 11 23H2 or 22H2. If it was only from monthly quality updates then each would usually not be larger than 4GB.

The monthly updates are that large because Microsoft decided that rather than writing thousands of tiny patches to update only the changes in the files anymore (which used to require different patches... depending on which old version you had, for each file!), that it was easier for them to simply force everyone to download the same complete set of replacement files in entirety, which of course only works well for people with high-speed internet and plenty of free SSD space.
OTOH feature updates are essentially an entire OS install so have always been really large, with the latest requiring ~30GB of free space to uncompress and install, despite the .iso still being small enough to fit onto a dual-layer DVD.

If you have no problems and are sure you won't be needing to roll-back to the most recent previous version of Windows, then it is safe to delete those files to recover the space.

 

[SkyNetRising]

This is a 4-month-old new PC starts with "Windows 11 Professional" operating system

Your laptop probably was sold with previous windows 11 release version installed (like 23H2 version).
And you have recently installed latest release version (24H2). This is done automatically via windows update.
\windows.old - contains previous release version files.

If you do not intend to return back to previous version, then you can clean up old release version files.
They will be deleted automatically after some time anyway.