Fixed: Can’t Find Large Files on Windows 10/11 Computer

When a computer is used for several months, the hard drive space gradually fills up, and Windows becomes increasingly sluggish. The simplest approach to clear up space is to locate huge files in Windows 10 and then permanently delete or relocate them to another storage place.

However, you must be cautious when deleting any huge file unless you know what it is and what it accomplishes. Otherwise, you may wind up removing crucial Windows files, which may have an impact on the functionality of your computer.

If you want to quickly and securely filter large files from all your data files and delete unnecessary files, let’s move to the next part.

3 ways to fix [Can’t find large files on Windows 10/11]

In this part, we’ll show you 3 ways to find large files and how to delete them on your Windows computer.

Method 1. Use File Explorer to find large files

Read-only, archive, hidden, and system are 3 common file properties. Files set as hidden or system files will not be visible in File Explorer. As a result, you should enable the hidden files option so that Explorer may hunt for huge hidden files in addition to conventional files.

Step 1. Open File Explorer by clicking its icon on the taskbar.

Step 2. Click File in the left upper corner and choose Change folders and search options. Then a Folder Options window will pop up.

Step 3. Skip to the View tab and check Show hidden files, folders, and drives. Then, click Apply and then OK After that, you can see those hidden files in File Explorer.

Then, we can use File Explorer to search for large files.

Step 1. Click This PC and then double-click a partition to open it.

Step 2. Click the search box in the upper right corner. Then, the hidden search tab will appear.

Step 3. Click Size and choose one size option from the drop-down menu. Then, File Explorer will search for and display files. The size options include:

Empty (0 KB), Tiny (0 – 10 KB)
Small (10 – 100 KB)
Medium (100 KB – 1 MB)
Large (1 – 16 MB)
Huge (16 – 128 MB)
Gigantic (> 128 MB).

If there are too many files, you can right-click on the files and navigate to size:>xxMB/GB. Click Size and then files will be displayed from large size to small size.

Method 2. Use CMD to find large files

Command Prompt can also help you find large files. But the commands might be a little complex.

Step 1. Press the "Windows + R" keys to open the Run box. Then, type "cmd" into the Run box and hit Enter key to open Command Prompt window.

Step 2. Type: FORFILES /S /M * /C "cmd /c if @fsize GTR 1048576 echo @path

if you want to search for the largest files in a specific drive, for example, C drive, type: cd C:\ press Enter, and type the above command: C:\>forfiles /S /M * /C "cmd /c if @fsize GEQ 1048576 echo @path

You can change the size in the command.

CMD can not only filter large files, it can use different command lines to clean junk files in different locations.

Method 3. Use a third-party cleaner to easily find and delete large files

Both the built-in tools can do basic searching for large files on your computer. However, Files Explorer will run quite slowly if you’ve tried to search a file before. All large files will spend a long time. While the CMD, the above command line is only for searching, it can’t execute any deleting operation, you’ll need other orders to deal with large files.

To avoid cumbersome work, here, we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to help you easily find the large files that spread on your disk and securely delete unnecessary files. This tool is a disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP users to efficiently manage their devices. It has three ways to help you clean your PC:

• App Mover: This function allows you to relocate installed apps and files to a different location without having to reinstall them. This one is quite beneficial if you have any apps installed on the C disk. After the migration, the relocated programs can boot immediately from the new location.

• PC Cleaner: This feature can scan your computer for garbage files such as temp files, cache files, and so on, and then remove them all with a single click.

• Delete Large Files: After scanning the specified area with this function, the program will show any large files that were not classified as garbage; if you believe some of them are no longer needed, you may tick them and delete them directly.

We'll demonstrate the "Delete Large Files" feature here; you can learn more about the other two features by visiting the links.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, and then click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select the partitions that you want to find large files, and click "Start Scan" to scan for large files.

Step 3. When the scan is complete, all large files found are listed. Tick the files you want to delete, and then click the "Delete" button.

Note: If the file is marked as red, once you’re sure it’s unnecessary you can also delete it.

Step 4. This step will list all the files you have ticked to delete, click "Delete Now" after confirming that it is correct, then these files will be deleted successfully.

Final words

Now you won’t say you can’t find large files on Windows 10/11. If you find that two Windows tools are not suited for you, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant, since it has simple operations and you don’t need to waste much time searching.

What’s more, this tool provides many helpful utilities like merging partitions and allocating free space from one drive to another to help you extend drive space. And you can use “Disk Clone Wizard” or “Migrate OS to SSD” to conveniently upgrade disks without reinstalling OS. Even, you can recover lost data if you have accidentally deleted.

In addition, this software also has the Server Edition for Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003 users.