A user speaks 30 gigabytes in 24 hours

If you discovered in the last few days that your Windows PC unexpectedly and inexplicably ran out of space, The culprit might be the most anticipated: none other than Windows Defender, The official anti-malware solution from Microsoft.

The problem is a bug in this program that causes it to start creating files inside the folder C: ProgramData Microsoft Windows Defender Scans History Store. These files are always small (many of them, only 1 to 2 KB in size), however The rapid pace with which they are produced can generate thousands or millions of these files, By adding several gigabytes of space used on our hard drives.

Thus, the testing system with Windows 10 20H2 that Ghacks post used produced more than 10,800 files in 24 hours, while it was a user of Windows Server 2019. Speak on Microsoft Answers forums from More than 4 million files (More than 11 GB) appeared out of nowhere in the same time period. Another, with less than a million files, However, he saw the space used on his disk increase by 30GB.

This “bug” is only present in version 18100.5 of the engine Windows Defender detection, and it only affects some users who use this software as their default antivirus and Real-time analysis enabled (Unfortunately, this is a fairly common setting.)

On the other hand, this appears to be a bug It is independent of the specific version of Windows we are using, And its appearance is only determined by the version of the anti-malware engine that Windows Defender uses.

How do you know if it affects us (and how to solve it)

According to Microsoft’s answers, New version 18100.6 of Windows Defender Engine actually solves the error, But it won’t start reaching most users until tomorrow. you may Check the version of the driver you have installed By opening the Windows Security app, clicking on the “Settings” icon in the lower left corner and opening the “About” screen.

If this screen does not display information about the drive version on your computer, that means that you are using another antivirus program by default.

Meanwhile, the only option to avoid running out of space on your hard drive is to be aware of reducing its free space To clear manually created files In the above-mentioned folder … Or disable real-time protection Windows Defender, which can cause our PC to be left unprotected.