How Can I Delete the “System Volume Information” Folder?

What the “System Volume Information” folder is, and how you can remove it from external drives.

If you’ve formatted a drive on Windows and enabled hidden files, you’ve likely noticed a folder called System Volume Information. It appears with vague contents and no clear explanation. Why is it there, and how much space is it consuming?

Windows sets strict permissions on this folder, blocking access even for administrators. The idea is to keep the system files intact, since they contain protocols that tell Windows how to interact with the device. Interestingly, in our own testing, drives continued to function normally without this folder, even when storing different types of data.

According to Microsoft’s documentation, the folder holds metadata used for System Restore. That makes sense for a system drive, but it doesn’t explain why it shows up on removable media where restore points don’t apply. This leads many users to see it as wasted space. One option is to shrink it using Control Panel settings: Control Panel > System and Security > System > System Protection. From there you can adjust how much disk space is reserved for restore data.

Unfortunately, shrinking didn’t reclaim as much space as we hoped. The bigger challenge is that Windows doesn’t want you to delete this folder at all. Built-in tools won’t allow it, and permission edits are blocked at the OS level. To fully clear it, we looked outside of Windows to a third-party option.

Nexcopy, who we’ve used in the past for USB utilities, offers a free tool with an Erase function. It wasn’t designed specifically to delete a single folder, but by wiping the drive and then moving content back afterward, the unwanted system folder was gone. The result: a clean drive without the hidden baggage, plus a utility we can reuse any time the OS plants files we don’t want.