Now, we have a Windows log file that has been silently eating up space on people’s storage drives, with a Microsoft customer support agent even suggesting buying a new hard drive when a user complained about it.When he contacted Microsoft support, the agent had never heard of the bug and had to loop in a supervisor before responding. The result was a suggestion to buy a new portable hard drive, and no help deleting the bloated file either.
What happened?
The same update also shipped a redesigned Start menu, a new point-in-time restore feature, and support for bigger local AI models, so it is not like Microsoft was short on engineering hours to spare.
The file responsible is CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal, a write-ahead log for the database Windows uses to track camera, microphone, and location permission requests. It’s supposed to stay a few megabytes and clear itself out after about a month. Instead, it can balloon past 500GB, sitting in a folder Windows won’t even let you open to check.This is not something new that has popped over the past few months, a Reddit thread from a year ago had the same file ballooning to 513GB on someone else’s machine, with no folder anywhere to explain where the space went.We are used to hearing about Copilot eating storage space on Windows machines, showing up in applications it has no business in, and generally being a nuisance for anyone who prefers an AI-free computer.
A quiet fix
The user who got the hard drive advice was Donald Gibson, who posted about it on Microsoft’s Q&A forum in March 2026. His System and Reserved storage had ballooned to 111GB when it should have sat around 40GB, all thanks to a single 66.5GB CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file eating up precious space on his 221GB drive.But not everyone will have this now, as the full rollout is expected with the July 2026 Patch Tuesday update, which is well over a year after the first reports started showing up.The official fix didn’t show up until June 29, quietly tacked onto the release notes under the “Change log” section for a preview update that had already shipped six days earlier.
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