Starting with the May 2019 Update, Windows 10 will reserve about 7 GB of your device’s storage for updates and optional files. This will ensure easy installation of updates in the future—but you can recover that space if you want.
What is Reserved Storage?
Windows requires a certain amount of free disk space to update. Updates will fail to install if your PC doesn’t have enough free space. With the recent May 2019 Update, Microsoft aims to fix this problem by reserving disk space for future updates.
Before, if you had insufficient free disk space on your PC, Windows would fail to install updates properly. The only workaround is to free up some storage space before continuing.
With “reserved storage,” Microsoft makes Windows 10 set aside at least 7 gigabytes of space on your hard drive to ensure updates can download—regardless of how much disk space you have.
When not being used by update files, Reserved Storage will be used for apps, temporary files, and system caches, improving the day-to-day function of your PC.
In other words, reserved storage doesn’t mean that Windows is using a full extra 7 GB of storage—it’s likely storing some temporary files there that it would normally be stored elsewhere on your system drive.
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How to Check If Your PC Has Reserved Storage
Before you go any further, you should make sure that your system is using Reserved Storage. If it doesn’t, then there’s no need to go on, because Windows isn’t reserving any additional storage on your device. You can check whether or not the system is using extra storage—and how much—through the Settings app.
