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What Is Hiberfil.sys And Should You Delete It?

You’re here because you were browsing your hard drive and noticed an enormous file called hiberfil.sys just sitting there. Should you delete it? What exactly is this hiberfil.sys file and why is it so big in size? Well, in this article we’re going to teach you all about it.


What Is Hiberfil.sys?

There are several ways of “shutting down” your computer whenever you’re not using your computer. There’s the obvious way — actually shutting it down —, and there are a few others, such as the Sleep and the Hibernate mode.

While Sleep uses a bit of power in order to keep the information on your computer’s memory, Hibernate uses far less power in order to do essentially the same. The main difference is the power usages and the fact that the Hibernate mode will actually store the information on your computer’s memory in your hard drive.

Hibernate turns off your computer as well, but it saves the information on its memory and makes turning it back on a much faster process — hence the hiberfil.sys file.

While it’s actually recommended to use the Sleep or Hibernate mode instead of shutting down your computer, many people choose not to do so for various reasons. If you’re one of those people, then it might make sense to disable the Hibernate mode. Doing so will allow you to delete the hiberfil.sys file.

The hiberfil.sys file can take up a lot of space. If your computer is running low on disk space, disabling the Hibernate mode and deleting the hiberfil.sys file might be an option worth considering. As you can see, in our example the hiberfil.sys file takes up 13 GB of disk space.

So, how do you disable the Hibernate mode?


How to Disable Hibernate Mode

Disabling Hibernate mode works pretty much the same for every Windows version after XP. That is, this tutorial will work for Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, and Windows 10.




In order to disable your computer’s Hibernate mode, you need to run the Command Prompt as an admin. If the thought of running the Command Prompt scares you, don’t worry — we’re just going to type in a single command.

Just open the Start menu and start typing “Command Prompt”. When it pops-in, right-click it and run it as an administrator.


command prompt - run as administrator


Once the Command Prompt is open, just type in the following command: “powercfg -h off”

After pressing enter, you’ve disabled the Hibernate function of your computer. You can try to put your computer in Hibernate mode via the Start menu, but you’ll see that it’s not even an option anymore.

Now, if you go back to your disk, you’ll see that the hiberfil.sys file has disappeared. The space it was taking has been freed as well.

If you ever want to revert the changes, you just need to open the Command Prompt again and type in the following command: “powercfg -h on” — it’s as easy as that.

Just remember, that once you reenable the Hibernate function, Windows will create the hiberfil.sys file again.

And that’s pretty much it regarding the hiberfil.sys. If you have any other doubts let us know and we’ll help you.