New Windows 10 preview shows off storage trick to save you disk space

Windows 10

Microsoft has pushed out another fresh preview build for the big Windows 10 update due next month (Redstone 5), with a bunch of general fixes for fast ring testers, and one more interesting change highlighted which aims to help you manage your drive space better.

Storage Sense is, as the name suggests, all about enabling you to make more sensible use of your available storage space.

The latest introduction is the ability to automatically free up space on your drive by taking older and/or unused files on the local disk, and putting them online. In other words, filing them away in OneDrive, with the actual files being represented as placeholders on your PC.

Everything happens seamlessly in the background, so this could be a nifty and convenient feature for those struggling to find storage space on their local drive. Testers will need to turn the feature on (in Settings, under System > Storage) to give it a whirl.

Still tinkering

Oddly enough, in the blog post detailing the new preview build (17758), Microsoft says this capability went live in a previous build (17720), but the firm has only highlighted it now, and further notes that it’s making “continuous improvements” in every update.

There aren’t any other changes in this build, and the rest of the work Microsoft has done revolves around bug fixes, including stopping certain apps crashing when saving files.

Of course, it’s only to be expected that the amount of tweaking is dying down, given that the release of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update is just around the corner now.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).