How Do I Free up the SSD Space Consumed with ETL Files

Introduction

The issue that SSD hard drive space not enough may often occur to you, and thus how to free up space is crucial.

Recently, I saw a post claiming that SSD is 50% consumed with ETL files. Read here, you may wonder that what ETL file is and how to free up SSD space consumed with ETL files. Yes, this also the question raised by the person who posted this issue.

Now, let’s explore this problem together.

How to Fix High SSD Space Usage Consumed with ETL Files

First and foremost, what is ETL? ETL stands for Event Tracking Log. It is a binary file format that captures log information from a variety of built-in Windows tools and diagnostic utilities.

Windows 10 usually keeps most of ETL files. You can find the number of ETL files (between 700 and 2000) on various Windows 10 computers though Voidtools Everything. Here are some tips on checking Windows 10 ETL files.

• Keeping ETL files is not necessary. You don’t have to keep ETL files around. If you have a lot of them, it may cost you some time to figure out where logging should be turned on (and what should be turned off).
• Most ETL files are protected or exist in protected directories. You can nearly delete all of these files by running Explorer (or Everything) as administrator. If all the other methods don’t work, please boot from a bootable media to enter the BIOS and delete the files with Command Prompt in the Windows Recovery Environment.
• Most ETL files are small, but a few of them are very large. In this case, you can free up more space by deleting these big files.

Based on these tips, you can decide whether you need to delete these ETL files or not. Of course, if you are not sure whether the content is important, make a backup before deleting it.

Deleting ETL files is an effective method to free up SSD space, but you can also upgrade to larger hard drive to fix the space not enough issue. If you don’t want to delete ETL files in case you lose valuable data, upgrading to a larger hard drive is a great choice for you. In this way, you are able to save more other files on the SSD drive in addition to these space-consumed ETL files.

This post can help you free up space on SSD Windows 10: 10 Ways to Free up Disk Space in Windows 10 – 2018 Update

In a word, to free up SSD space consumed with ETL files is not difficult. Importantly, you need to pay attention to the content you would like to delete in case your PC crashes or cannot run normally due to the inappropriate deletion.