If you have hibernation enabled in your Windows 10, then a file hiberfil.sys exists in the root of your C: drive. Windows 10 stores there the memory contents when you hibernate your PC. You can shrink the hibernation file in Windows 10 with a single command.
The hiberfil.sys stores the contents of RAM (random access memory) when you hibernate your PC. When your PC resumes from hibernation, Windows 10 loads the file contents again and writes it back to RAM. The hibernation file occupies a huge amount of disk space.
While you can disable hibernation, it is a bad idea. In Windows 10, Fast Startup depends on hibernation. If you disable hibernation, it won’t work.
You can shrink the hibernation file up to 50% of your installed memory capacity. Let’s see how it can be done.
Shrink Hibernation File in Windows 10 and Reduce its Size
- Open an elevated command prompt. To do it, type cmd.exe in the Search box(Cortana) and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter:
- Type or paste the following command:
powercfg hibernate size 60
This will shrink your hibernation file to 60% of the installed RAM. The new file size will be visible in the command output.
- You can adjust size of the hiberfile.sys file in percentage of the total memory by replacing “60” with any desired value in the command above.
The hibernation file will be reduced in size.
To undo the operation, you can do the following.
- Open an elevated command prompt.
- Type or paste the following command:
powercfg hibernate size 100
This will restore your hibernation file to 100% of the installed RAM. See the screenshot:
