How to delete backup files in windows 10: In this generic world, everyone and everything is momentarily computerized. Which also includes our daily routine work and assignments to be prepared and saved in our laptops and computers. But apart from this, there is a fear that always haunts us to lose the same data by accident.
So to protect it, we generally set up Windows 10 backups. This provides us with a backup of our drive to restore our data, but the downside of this setup is the loss in our hard drives’ space, especially on smaller sized drives.
To uncover this issue and reduce the filling of disk space, we have to delete some delete windows update files that we don’t require. We can remove that unrequired backup files and folders in two different ways –
1. Deleting old backups by using the control panel (File History Cleanup)
2. And by using command prompt. (or Windows PowerShell)
We will discuss both methods, But we recommend the first one as it is considerably more accessible and can be applied by anyone, without any difficulties.
Method 1
- Go to the windows startup menu and right-click on it, now open the search box and type control panel. Now select the control panel and open it.
- Now in the control panel, you will see ‘Systems and Security’ on the top left, click on it and open it.
- After opening this, go to File History and open it. You will see file history on the right side of the tab below power options.
- In this tab, you can see which of your files and folders are backed up by your ‘C drive’ and to which other drive they are backing into.
- Also, from this tab, you can stop or close the backup of your files and folders.
- Now click on Advanced Settings, which appears on the left side of the tab. Please open it
- Here you will see many options like ‘save copies of files, ‘ which help us set a regular backup of our files and folders, which can be changed according to our needs.
- You will find a section written as “Clean Up Sections” under the Versions .click on it.
- And a new tab will open, asking you How Older Versions of Files and Folder you want to delete. This helps us to ensure that all the backups are not deleted; from this, we may specify the exact backups according to months.
- Click on it, and select as per your requirements.
- Now click on “Clean Up” and wait for the process to complete.
- There can be errors showing that you don’t have any version of files or folder that old, this means you need to change the period and repeat the process. This occurs because you might not have any backups that long.
- After the completion, click on OK.
METHOD 2
- Press Windows button + R, now a run tab will open. Type “cmd” in it, and click on the OK button to open a command prompt.
- Now command prompt will open, In here you need to write the command for the period of backup versions you want to delete.
- Now type “FhManagew.exe -cleanup 0” in it. (Here 0 = All but the last month, which means that all the backup will be deleted, leaving the backup of last month. You can also change this to 30,90,180,365. Which means Older than one month, three months, six months, and one year respectively) and press enter.
- Now, if you find errors showing that ‘you don’t find any versions of your file that were that old,’ click on close and repeat the above step by changing duration(month) in command prompt.
- If the clean up completed successfully, click on OK.
- The same process can be done from Window PowerShell also. To open the PowerShell window, you need to press the Windows button + X.
- Here you will see Windows PowerShell, click on it, and it will open. Now repeat the steps from where we started giving the command.
Conclusion
These are the two basic methods you can delete your backup files in Windows 10, which you don’t require anymore. You can learn about it completely from CrunchyTricks. However in these methods, we have also discussed how we can change the settings of backup files and also how we can change the time duration of backup to happen.
