Windows · Storage
The space isn't
where you're looking.
You empty the Recycle Bin, uninstall a game, reclaim eleven gigabytes, and a week later you are back where you started. The space is rarely in the places Explorer shows you — it is in hibernation files, shadow copies and caches that no folder view puts in front of you.
VaultSort for Windows is in beta. Free to try, no account required.
Where the space actually goes
Application and browser caches
Chrome, Edge, Teams, Discord, Adobe, Docker, npm, pip, Gradle. Individually a few hundred megabytes; collectively, on a working machine, routinely tens of gigabytes. This is almost always the largest recoverable total and the one nothing surfaces.
The hibernation file
hiberfil.sys is as large as your installed RAM. Thirty-two gigabytes of memory means a thirty-two gigabyte file, sitting there whether or not you ever hibernate.
Volume Shadow Copies
System Restore and File History keep snapshots, and they are genuinely useful right up until they are silently holding a tenth of the drive.
Things that look disposable and are not
WinSxS looks enormous and is partly an illusion of hard links counted twice; deleting from it by hand breaks Windows Update. A .git directory looks like cache and is your history. This is why removing things by folder name is how people lose work.
What VaultSort does about it
Storage breakdown by folder
Shows size by directory, so you can see that one cache is holding 40 GB rather than guessing at a category called “Other”. The decision makes itself once you can see it.
Allowlist-driven cleaning
Space Saver removes paths that are known cache locations — not anything that merely resembles one. That is a narrower net than some tools cast, and it is narrower deliberately.
Large file finder
For the ISO you downloaded in 2024 and the video export you meant to delete.
Duplicate detection by content
Compares files by content rather than filename, which is what catches the same photo saved four times under four names.
No registry cleaning
Deliberately absent. The evidence that it helps a modern Windows install is not there, and the downside risk is real. A cleaner that offers it is telling you how it thinks about risk.
Honest reporting
Locked files are reported as locked, not as failures and not as successes. An earlier version recorded them identically to genuine errors, so a run that freed several gigabytes announced “52 files could not be deleted”. That was wrong in the other direction, and it was fixed.
What it does not do yet
- — System-level cleanup is partial on Windows compared with the macOS build. The user-level cleaner is the part exercised end to end on real hardware.
- — VaultSort will not turn off hibernation or cap shadow copies for you — both are one-line changes in Windows itself, and doing them behind your back would be the wrong call.
- — Search is not in the Windows build yet.
Questions people ask
Is deleting caches safe?
Yes, by definition — a cache is expensive to rebuild and never authoritative. The cost of clearing one is a slower next launch. The risk is in tools that treat things which merely look like caches the same way.
How is this different from Disk Cleanup or Storage Sense?
Those are free, safe and built in, and worth running. They only know the paths Microsoft knows about, which on a development machine is a fraction of the space. The gap is third-party application caches.
Will it show me what it is going to delete?
Yes — per path, before anything happens. A tool that reports a headline figure and offers a Clean button is asking you to trust a category name.
Try it on your own files
One purchase, no subscription. $24.99 once, and every feature is included.