Microsoft announced that it will begin depreciating the Disk Cleanup tool starting in Windows 10 v1809, and in its place they are ramping up the built-in Storage sense feature originally released with Windows 10.
Storage sense will automatically run cleanups when your disk is low on space, but you can configure it further to run on a schedule.
Storage sense can be found in Settings/system/storage
Self-activate on Low Storage
Storage Sense can now turn itself on when your device is low on storage space. Once activated, Storage Sense will intelligently run whenever your device runs low on storage space and clear temporary files that your device and applications no longer need.
Storage Sense looks for and will remove the following types of files:
Temporary setup files
Old indexed content
System cache files
Internet cache files
Device Driver packages
System downloaded program files
Dated system log files
System error memory dump files
System error minidump files
Temporary system files
Dated Windows update temporary files
And more
If you’d like to clear even more space on your device, you can enable the removal of old content in the Downloads folder. Downloads folder cleanup is not turned on by default.
The configuration page of Storage Sense is very basic and you don’t have a lot of options to change anything here.
For example, you have the following options to run Storage Sense:
Every day
Every week
Every month
During low free disk space time (default)
You can also use the “Locally available cloud content” section on the Storage Sense page to remove unused files that are already stored on OneDrive.
For example, you can let Storage Sense run every week and select a 14-day window for Files On-Demand.
This will allow Storage Sense to run once a week, automatically identifying files that you haven’t used in the past 14 days, and make those files be available online only by using your OneDrive storage.
As you can see, Storage Sense offers an easy to use method to remove unnecessary files from your computer to free up space. This is especially useful for small C: drives that may be running on limited capacity SSD drives.
