Win 10 real size?

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Hi all,

I'm going to install Win 10 in a VM under Linux. Microsoft claims that you need 32GB of disk space but of course Windows is renowned for chewing resources. Can anyone tell me how much space is really required for the OS and a reasonable suite of apps while allowing space for updates? If your experience is in a VM so much the better! User files will not be located in the VM; they are in another partition and will be mounted as a drive. [BTW I know I could dynamically allocate the disk space but that risks letting the disk image bloat until it fills the partition - and I need space for other files.]

Thanks
David

[gary]

Hi David,

You didn't happen to mention whether you are using VMware or VirtualBox.
I will assume VMWare in the discussion below.

I can tell you if you create the virtual hard disk with a capacity set to some arbitrary large value,
then after installing Windows 10, your C folder will show it has used 26GB.

As you noted you can set up VMWare so that the virtual file hard drive does not pre-allocate the
disk space but instead will simply allocate file space from the host machine to the guest
machine on demand.

Therefore if you use the "don't pre-allocate disk space option", when you look at the actual
file size of the VMWare image after Windows 10 has been installed, it too is only 26GB,
irrespective of the total capacity you assigned to it.

To help ensure the amount of storage used on the C drive does not appreciably
increase over time, I would recommend turning Restore Points to OFF on it.

If your application software is on a totally different partition/virtual drive and you turn
restore points off for the virtual C drive, then it isn't going to "bloat" over time.

Anecdotally those of us that use a SSD for the C drive on a physical
machine to hold the OS but little else will have noted that when Restore Points are
set to off, its storage requirements don't change significantly even over many years of use.

From time to time however, Windows will want to apply updates to the files that constitute
the operating system.

Whilst it is upgrading, it will probably need temporary storage space on the C drive to store the update
whilst still having the current versions of the OS files still present.

It will probably clean these up after reboot. So with that in mind, it might be prudent to be prepared for
the usage to be temporarily two or three times greater than the initial 26GB.

What I would recommend is to make the virtual C drive an arbitrary large value, say 1000GB, do not pre-allocate the
storage on the virtual machine setup and set Restore Points to off on the C drive from within the virtual machine.

With Restore Points set to off, you will of course have some other backup strategy in place, that is, backing up the whole
virtual machine on a daily basis. If something goes pear-shaped, roll back to the previous backup of the virtual machine.

By declaring the drive to have some arbitrary large value, say 1000GB, it gives you the flexibility to move it to a different
physical machine if circumstances change and then the storage capacity is there if for some reason you need it.

I trust you will find this helpful.

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Gary,

Thank you for taking so much time with your reply.

I'm using Virtual Box and the size of virtual disk images can be either statically or dynamically assigned, however once a dynamic vdi grows it cannot subsequently shrink - the bloat is permanent. My issue with space is that I'm trying to keep the vdi on my 240GB SSD. I have 48GB free atm but could free up another 35GB by putting the soon-to-be-retired Win 7 vdi on a spinning disk. An additional 21GB could be gained by losing one of the Linux system partitions (it's presently unused) but no way can I get to 1000GB of free space on the whole machine (including spinning disks). If you are right about the space requirements during upgrade then I am starting to have to look at upgrading my SSD to get Win 10 on the machine - the OS alone may fill all the space I have before I even install software.

This whole rabbit hole opened after I bought a Canon 90D. The new .cr3 raw files aren't supported under Linux and there is no indication when that will happen, and my old Win 7 is only 32bit and so doesn't support the Canon software. So to process images I'll have to bite the bullet and move to Win 10. (There is the possibility of using the Adobe DNG converter under Wine but I'm not keen - never had much success with Wine.) It's just a bit peeving that I'll have to buy a new drive, do extra work installing OSes etc, and then actually pay!!! for software . I think Alex would refer to it as 'character building'.