This Windows 11 24H2 bug eats up 9GB of your drive – and you can’t delete it

Have you noticed that your Windows 11 machine has less free space on it after installing the 24H2 update? Don’t worry, you’re not going crazy. Reports are coming in that the update process leaves around 9GB of files sitting on your drive, and the worst bit is that you can’t just delete them.

Windows 11 24H2 is hogging people’s storage space

As spotted by Windows Latest, people are reporting a strange bug where updating to Windows 11 24H2 leaves around 9GB of files sitting around on the PC’s drive, which are undeletable. These files can be found within the Windows Update cache, which is where the operating system stores everything it needs to carry out an update.

Usually, these files are either deleted by Windows itself or by the user. In fact, the Disk Cleanup tool gives you the option to empty out the Windows Update cache folder and start anew. The only problem is, none of the usual methods for erasing the files seem to work. In the Feedback Hub, people are documenting their attempts, and none of them have seen success yet.

Fortunately, Microsoft is aware of the issue and mentioned to Windows Latest that it’s working on a fix. Turns out, the issue is due to teething problems with the new checkpoint updating system, which is meant to reduce the size of Windows updates. The system is tagging files as required for future updates, so it won’t let anything delete them. Seems that it kind of got the wrong idea as to what it was meant to be doing.

Windows Latest states that the files may not actually be 9GB large – they’re just incorrectly informing Windows that they are. Regardless, here’s hoping Microsoft gets a fix out the door soon.