Microsoft Is to Deprecate Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows 10

Microsoft Is to Deprecate Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows 10

Soon Microsoft will remove Disk Cleanup tool from Windows 10 PCs since Storage Sense that comes with the recent Windows 10 builds almost replicates the Disk Cleanup utility and can do the same work.

Disk Cleanup Has Been Used for 20 Years

Disk Cleanup, a Windows snap-in system utility, helps users to delete some unwanted files clustered in the PC so as to free up some disk space. By default, this tool comes with a simple mode but users can turn to its extended mode to delete more hidden files on their PCs.

Now, this tool has been used for 20 years since it debuted in Windows 98. Disk Cleanup always works the same way no matter what version of Windows users is using. Just right-click a drive, choose Properties feature and click Disk Cleanup button to run it.

And over time, this tool has become more and more useful. And it always works well to free up disk space that users need whether it is removing a few hundred MB of temporary files or deleting more than 10GB of leftover files after Windows 10 big update.

Disk Cleanup Will Disappear

However, this useful tool will be deprecated by Microsoft and this company introduces a more advanced feature in Windows 10 that is Storage Sense. This feature also appears in the latest version of Windows 10.

Storage Sense can work more or less same as Disk Cleanup. This new feature can automatically delete unwanted cluttered files from the PC to keep the storage optimized when it is enabled.

By default, it is turned off and users need to open it manually. Just go to Settings > Storage and click on Change how we free up automatically on the same page.

Even so, Disk Cleanup isn’t gone just yet. Microsoft isn’t removing this Tool straight away, and it’s simply flagging it as “deprecated”. According to this company:

“The Disk Cleanup experience (“cleanmgr.exe”) is being deprecated. We’re retaining the Disk Cleanup tool for compatibility reasons. There’s no need to worry since Storage Sense’s functionality is a superset of what the legacy Disk Cleanup provides!”Microsoft

This means it will disappear at some point in the future and the functionality of Disk Cleanup isn’t going anywhere but is rolled into Windows 10 Storage Sense.

Final Words

In conclusion, it is an inescapable thing to deprecate Disk Cleanup in Windows 10. At present, Storage Sense feature can help to clean up the system garbage regularly and users can custom the cleaning cycle, for example, run Storage Sense once per day, week, or month, or whenever disk space gets low, which is more user-friendly than the passive design of disk cleaning.

What’s more, this function can perform some operations that Disk Cleanup can’t do, for instance, make old and unused files in the OneDrive folder online-only to give users more free space.

Thus it can be seen that Microsoft to remove Disk Cleanup tool is necessary.