How To Delete The Hibernation File On Windows 10
You can view storage usage by folder for all your drives on Windows 10. There’s a built-in tool that you can use to find what’s taking up the most space on your system. For some folders, such as the temporary files folder, there’s a quick clean up button that will delete files in it. For others, you have to go through File Explorer to delete files. If you’re looking to delete large, unwanted files, you might have noticed that Windows 10 has a fairly large Hibernation File. You can’t directly access it which means you can’t delete the Hibernation File from the File Explorer. Here’s what you need to do to regain that bit of space.
Delete Hibernation File On Windows 10
On older versions of Windows, you could open your C drive, find the hibernation file named hiberfil.sys. On Windows 10, the file seems to have been hidden so that you can find it even with an admin account. Regardless, you can still delete it in much the same way as you could on older versions of Windows.
We should mention that if you often put your system in Hibernation mode, you should not delete this file. You need it to resume your system. If you do not use Hibernation mode, and instead prefer to shut down your system at the end of the day, you can lose the file and your system won’t suffer for it. You will need admin rights to delete the hibernation file.
Open Command Prompt with admin rights, paste the following, and tap Enter.
powercfg -h off
Restart your system for good measure and the hibernation file on Windows 10 will be gone. You can check the Storage tab in the System group of settings inside the Settings app to make sure the size of the hibernation file has been reduced to 0. It’s under System & Reserved.
The above command will delete the hibernation file but it will also disable hibernate mode. That’s the only way to get rid of the file. The hiberfil.sys file doesn’t reduce its size if/when you shut down your system. It maintains that size, or might get bigger but so long as you have hibernate mode enabled on your system, it’s going to be there. We should mention that the file will exist even if you’ve never put your system in hibernate mode.
If you later decide to use hibernate mode, you will need to enable it again. Open Command Prompt with administrative rights, and enter the following command.
powercfg -h on
