WER ReportQueue directory taking up WAY too much space

[The Murderous Cop]

So I recently did a quick check of my system using WinDirStat because I was low on space (around 10-20GB left). I saw a bunch of files taking up space in Downloads, so I removed those, but after I waited for it to fully finish, I noticed something.



This was taking up the #1 amount of space on my system. I thought to myself: "why would THIS of all things be taking so much space?"
Then, I took a look at what could have possibly be holding them.

It was ReportQueue. How much space could it possibly ta-


What. In the forget. I checked to see if it was safe to delete (it was), and then I removed it from my computer.
Can someone explain why this loving piece of stuff took up almost 25% of my hard drive?

[Ad Bot]

[Pastrey Crust]

Because sou use a toaster with so many errors that the error log is loving massive.

[Trogtor]

at least 100 gigs of hard drive space didn't magically disappear

[Nickelob Ultra]

If you've had TONS of memory dumps of your whole memory + page file, that may have been the cause.  I have 16GB of RAM and ~16GB pagefile solely for Cities Skylines because that thing eats memory like its what it was made for, and any crashes I've had just take up chunks of my SSD.

Or it could be logging literally every single warning and error in Windows and you have a lot of them which you may want to look into.

It also depends on how long you've had this installation for and how many errors you've gotten really, but 370GB is absurd.

[McJob]

Whenever an application crashes, Windows gathers any data related to the crash and stores them as part of the report files, and this can include chunks of memory (both RAM and the Paging File), as well as related files on the hard-drive. Naturally, standard errors and messages from applications will also generate log files which may include additional data.

Generally speaking, if you encounter a lot of crashes, then yes, you will need to clear out the log file "cache" every once in a while.

Fun (but slightly unrelated) fact; every time you make a change to the Windows Registry, a temporary "receipt" is kept in a folder under the Windows directory to verify that a "transaction" occurred. These files are commonly wiped whenever you log out or shut down the system. If you keep your system active for a particularly long time and run certain programs (like NVIDIA's 3D stuff) which actively modify the registry constantly, than you can easily run these receipts up to 500GBs of hard-drive space.