What is hiberfil.sys and How Do I Delete It?

Have you ever came across a huge file sitting in the root directory of your computer’s hard drive named hiberfil.sys? And even worse, maybe wanting to delete hiberfil.sys but were unable to with an error message popping up that the file was locked down by Windows. Well, here we will show you how this file can be removed from your computer’s hard drive and free up some space.

The file hiberfil.sys is used by Windows for it’s hibernation power state. How this works is your computer’s memory state will be written to the file and then shut down. The battery can even be removed if it is a laptop and put back in. Once you turn the computer back on, it will resume right back to the state it was in previously, without having to wait for long boot up times. The more memory, or RAM you computer has, the larger hiberfil.sys will be. In our case, we have 16 GB of RAM installed and the hiberfil.sys file was 12.70 GB in size. Of course if you take advantage of hibernate mode, you will not want to remove this file, but for those of us that do not use hibernate, it is just wasting space on our machines.

Another power management mode in contrast to Hibernate, is Sleep Mode. This keeps the computer in a low power state, which will return to normal in a very short amount of time after moving the mouse our pushing a key on the keyboard. This is what I use on my desktop as it needs to be turned on all the time for access from remote locations.

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