Privacy & safety
The questions people ask before they trust a tool that watches their disk.
No. Folder paths, file names, sizes and counts are written to a single database file inside your own Windows user profile, and read back from there. They are never transmitted anywhere.
If you bought through the Microsoft Store, the app makes no requests to any server we operate. The only network activity is Windows checking your Store licence, which Windows performs itself.
If you bought by card on polar.sh, the app contacts our licence service — about once a day, and when you activate. That exchange carries your licence token, a random id for this PC, and the PC's name as you see it in Windows. It never carries anything about your disks: no paths, no file names, no sizes. That is enforced on our server, which rejects any request containing them, not merely promised here.
Because it doesn't need them, and a tool that constantly watches your disk shouldn't ask for the keys to your machine.
DiskSpace runs as a standard user. A handful of system folders are unreadable that way; those are counted as inaccessible and shown in the scan summary rather than triggering an elevation prompt. In practice this costs you almost nothing in accuracy.
A future optional “fast rescan” mode may offer elevation as a speed upgrade for very large drives — it will always be opt-in, and never required for the app to do its job.
No. Cloud-only files are identified by their file attributes and measured without ever being opened, so scanning cannot trigger a download or consume your data allowance.
This is deliberately tested against a real OneDrive account before every release — silently hydrating gigabytes of someone's cloud storage is exactly the kind of thing a disk tool must never do.
Never on its own. DiskSpace measures and explains; it does not clean. Nothing on your drives is modified, moved or removed by the app.
The only thing it deletes is its own history, when snapshots age past your retention window.
It's engineered specifically not to, because a disk-space tool that becomes the disk-space problem is worse than useless.
- Scans run at background I/O priority, so foreground apps always win
- Idle CPU use stays under 0.1%
- Scans are skipped during battery-saver mode and while a full-screen app or game is running
- Only changed folders are written to the database, keeping daily disk writes low — this matters on SSDs
Using DiskSpace
Day-to-day questions.
Free: 3 days. Premium: 60 days.
Snapshots from the last 48 hours are all kept, so recent changes are fine-grained. Beyond that, history is thinned to one snapshot per day — plenty to answer “what happened in the last month?” without a database that grows forever.
No — it's working exactly as intended, and this is the one genuine limitation of the whole idea.
DiskSpace can only report on changes it was present to observe. On day one you have a single measurement and nothing to compare it against. After a day you can see yesterday-versus-today; after a week the picture is genuinely useful.
That's the strongest argument for installing it before you have a disk problem rather than during one.
Roughly every six hours by default, plus once when you sign in if a scheduled measurement was missed while the PC was off. You can also scan on demand at any time.
Premium lets you change the schedule to anything from hourly to daily.
Internal fixed drives are watched by default. External and network drives can be added manually, but they're off by default — scanning a drive that's frequently disconnected produces confusing gaps, and scanning a network share can be slow and noisy for everyone else on it.
Drives are tracked by their volume identity rather than their letter, so history survives a drive letter changing.
The history database targets well under 200 MB even for 60 days of history on a drive with millions of files — because each snapshot stores only what actually changed, not a fresh copy of your whole folder tree.
The current size is always visible in Settings → Diagnostics, and you can clear it with one click.
Premium & licensing
How buying works, and what happens afterwards.
The whole “what changed” experience on the drive Windows runs from, with 3 days of history and folder browsing three levels deep, measured whenever you press Scan now — C:\ is the first level, C:\Users the second, C:\Users\YourName the third.
Premium opens every other drive on the machine, the rest of the folder tree, and 60 days of history.
One thing the free tier does not do is measure less. Scans always walk the full depth of the drive, on both tiers — a folder's size is the sum of everything inside it, so a shallower scan would print a wrong number rather than a smaller one. Free limits how deep you can browse, never how deep DiskSpace counts.
Two ways, same one-time price — never a subscription.
Microsoft Store (inside the app, or from the Store listing): billed by Microsoft using the payment method already on your account. Simplest, and the licence follows your account to every PC you own.
By card on polar.sh (from the pricing section here, or inside the app): Polar handles the checkout and the receipt. Afterwards, open DiskSpace → Premium → I bought on polar.sh, enter the same email address, and type the one-time code we send you. This licence covers one PC at a time.
We never see or store your card details on either route.
Bought in the Store: yes. The licence belongs to your Microsoft account, so signing in to the Store on another PC and installing DiskSpace gives you Premium there too, within Microsoft's normal device limits.
Bought by card: one PC at a time. You can move it as often as you like — activate on the new PC with a fresh code, and Premium switches off on the old one automatically. Nothing is deleted there; it simply goes back to the free view.
Note that history is per-PC and stays local on both routes — Premium unlocks the deeper window on each machine, it doesn't sync your data between them.
Your Premium licence restores automatically when you install DiskSpace again while signed in to the same Microsoft account — there's no key to keep or activation to redo.
Your history, being local, does not survive a wipe. If you want to preserve it, copy the database file shown in Settings → Diagnostics before reinstalling.
Yes. The licence answer is cached locally with a long grace period, so a laptop that's offline for weeks keeps all Premium features.
And if anything ever goes wrong with a licence check, the app falls back to the free experience — it never locks you out of your own history.
Partly, and deliberately so. DiskSpace quietly retains a little history beyond the 3-day free window, so buying Premium reveals extra history immediately instead of leaving you with an empty timeline to fill over the next two months.
Refunds follow the route you bought through. Store purchases use your Microsoft account order history under the Microsoft Store's standard refund policy. Card purchases use the Polar receipt flow, or our support address if you need help finding it. If something isn't working, email us first and we'll try to fix it.