Amount of free space on a Surface Pro 64GB after clean-up is around 40GB

[HoHo]

For those who are curious about the amount of free space available on the Surface Pro 64GB. I got about 40GB free after performing cleanups.

There is a Recovery partition for Windows 8 that eats up 8GB of space. The Recover partition is used by the Reset feature if you need restoring your Surface Pro to factory settings. You can recover this space by off-loading this partition to an USB drive (needs at least 8GB).

Go to the Control Panel, select Recovery, there is an option to create a USB Recovery drive. I used a 16GB USB drive since that was the only one I had. The backup took about 10 minutes. After the backup, it prompts whether you want to delete the Recovery partition and recover the space to drive C. I chose yes.

After that, I removed Office 2013 since I won't be purchasing a license. Lastly, I go to Administrative Tools and ran Disk Cleanup and select the Clean up system files button. After the cleanup, I got about 40GB free. There is enough room for many programs. All my data will be stored on my 64GB micro SDXC card.

Not too bad at all.

 

[J515OP]

That is really good when you consider one other thing. An advertised 64GB drive only has about 59.5GB of usable space on it to begin with (http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/...8-flash-memory-actual-capacity-estimates.html). That means your full Windows 8 OS and apps are only using up about 20GB of space. Not bad at all

 

[bosamar]

Plus with the microSD and taking advantage of the cloud it's a good way to go.

 

[mtalinm]

what exactly is the risk of deleting the recovery partition? 7G is a lot of space, so I doubt they'd sacrifice that if it weren't impt.

that said, in 20 years of using PCs I don't ever recall making use of one..

 

[bosamar]

what exactly is the risk of deleting the recovery partition? 7G is a lot of space, so I doubt they'd sacrifice that if it weren't impt.

that said, in 20 years of using PCs I don't ever recall making use of one..

He did not abandon it, It was removed to a USB stick.