Windows.old not auto deleting - Windows 10 Help Forums (2025)

Hi, after an upgrade how long should it be til windows.old deletes itself? I think MS keeps changing it around perhaps. My understanding was after 10 days. Version 2004 installed 10 days ago (10 days and 10 hours ago to be exact). I’ve turned the machine on this evening given it about half hour of idle time to do its thing but still no deletion. I know sometimes it doesn’t fully delete and can leave some residual small files behind but should be getting the 10-20 gigs back lost by the install. Yet that hasn’t happened . I know it can be forced via disk clean up but would prefer it to do it automatically. So I was curious. Maybe it needs a lot of idle time to do it?

I never knew MS auto deleted it. I always manually deleted it.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...ion-of-windows

Thanks, so it is 10 days. Just puzzled as to why Windows is not doing itself. But I will if it goes on a few more days do the method you have helpfully linked. It's a lot of storage to lose on an SSD drive!

Plankton said:

I never knew MS auto deleted it. I always manually deleted it.

I like to keep it around, lol. (I have lots of space.)

This is useful!

Set Number of Days can Go Back to Previous Version of Windows

@Scottyboy99 - You can also use Disk Cleanup in W10 if you want to get rid of it faster.

See these tutorials:

Delete Windows.old Folder in Windows 10
Free Up Drive Space in Windows 10

zbook said:

See these tutorials:

Delete Windows.old Folder in Windows 10
Free Up Drive Space in Windows 10

I think that the Tutorials need a Google Search.

Thanks.

Just to let you know that I left machine idle this evening for about 25 minutes. When I returned to it windows.old was gone and I got over 25 gigs back. So it seems that at least in my case 10 days was not the trigger point as it took 11 days before this kicked in. Anyway am pleased it worked as intended (kind of)

Scottyboy99 said:

Just to let you know that I left machine idle this evening for about 25 minutes. When I returned to it windows.old was gone and I got over 25 gigs back. So it seems that at least in my case 10 days was not the trigger point as it took 11 days before this kicked in. Anyway am pleased it worked as intended (kind of)

Glad it worked out in the end. I guess it gets triggered by a scheduled maintenance task. The timing of that should be daily, but at what hour seems fairly random. I suppose it could be up to 10 days 23 hours 59 minutes and still count as 'after 10 days'.

I once got bored and watched......

Bree said:

I usually delete windows.old immediately with Disk Clean Up, but for my upgrade from 1607 to 1703 I was curious, so I sat out the 10 days and watched Windows automatically delete it 10 days and one hour after the upgrade.

Don't worry about such mega trivialities. In my experience it is more like 14 days rather than 10 days.
Forget about it, 11 days, so what, not exactly a disaster.

If you really want to, as already mentioned, you can use disk cleanup.

Windows.old folder is deleted automatically from C:\ drive. It is done in 30 days time. I got 40 GB free space back.