Windows 11 Hibernation File

Hi kirbster.

Thank you for reaching out here in the Microsoft Community.

Based on your description and screenshots, it looks like you still have 51.1GB of storage space occupied by hibernation files after disabling sleep and hibernation.

I do understand your concern and doubt about the large hibernation file even after disabling sleep and hibernation.

Let's take a look at the hibernation file. Windows uses the hiberfil.sys file to store the state of the system when it goes into hibernation. Even if hibernation is disabled through power settings, the file remains in the system and takes up space.

You can refer to the following steps to make some changes to hiberfil.sys via the command prompt.

1 Search for “Command Prompt” in the taskbar, right-click it, and select Run as administrator.

2 Type the following commands according to your desired situation

The following command will completely disable hibernation and delete hiberfil.sys

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

If you don't want to disable hibernation completely, you can use the following command to resize hiberfil.sys, here to resize it to 50% as an example (the number after represents the percentage of hibernation file size configuration)

powercfg.exe /hibernate /size 50

Of course, we don't recommend you to set it too small, if it's too small, it's likely that you will get some errors or problems during hibernation, please keep it above 40% of your RAM.

In addition, you can also try the following steps to modify the virtual memory to see if it can change the size of the hibernation file

1 Right-click the Start button and select Settings>System>About(System Information)>Advanced System Settings

2 Click the Advanced tab, and in the Performance section, click the Settings button

3 Click the Advanced tab in the new window, find the Virtual Memory section and click Change

4 Check Automatically manage paging file size for all drives, or adjust manually.

5 Click OK

Check if there is a suitable value to reduce the hibernation file size.

Please try the above options and let me know the result.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

Best regards,

Zev - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

I am running 128Gb of Ram, so 51Gb is 40% of my Ram. Guess I'll create a restore point later on today before I attempt to turn it off and delete that file. Hopefully there won't be any adverse side effects. System was backed up yesterday as well.