Early adopters of the recently released Windows 11 version 24H2 have noticed a strange behavior of the new OS. When you perform a disk cleanup with with Windows Update files checked, the OS leaves several gigabyte of data untouched. This caused a lot of speculation that it is a bug in the OS.
The data left of the drive is exposed in the cleanmgr.exe tool and also appears in the Settings app under System > Storage > Temporary files. However, it is impossible to remove it using any of these tools.
While there is no official information of this case, the data left on the drive may be related to new checkpoint cumulative updates. It works as follows. Once a Windows 11 24H2 cumulative update is released as a checkpoint, future cumulative updates will generate binary differentials from the latest checkpoint binaries instead of the RTM version. This means the differentials will be smaller and more manageable for devices already synced to the latest checkpoint, resulting in a quicker update process.
Ghacks made a guess that the data left on the drive is related to such cumulative updates. If so, then the bug is that the files are shown in cleanup tools. Microsoft is yet to clarify what is going on.
Obviously, if you are affected and see nearly 8 GB of Windows Update files that you cannot delete, you should not do anything right away. Do not use any third-party tool to get rid of those files, and do not reset Windows Update.
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