Is your C: drive mysteriously filling up even though you haven’t installed anything new? A confirmed Windows 11 storage bug may be the reason. A hidden system file called CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal can silently balloon from a few megabytes to enormous sizes — users have reported it consuming anywhere from 70GB to a staggering 513GB of disk space. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and a fix is on the way, but you don’t have to wait to get your storage back.

Person using a Windows 11 laptop at home
Image: Microsoft

Why is this Windows 11 storage bug happening?

The file belongs to the Capability Access Manager service (camsvc), the component that tracks which apps are allowed to use your camera, microphone, location and screen capture. Windows logs this permission activity in a small SQLite database, and the .db-wal file is that database’s write-ahead log — a temporary journal that is supposed to be merged back into the main database and reset regularly.

Because of a logic error in the cleanup routine, that reset never happens on affected PCs. Every permission request and privacy toggle keeps appending data to the log, and nothing ever clears it. On machines where an app polls the camera, microphone or location frequently, the file grows fast — one user on Microsoft’s forums watched it gain about 1MB every 30 seconds until it crossed 80GB.

Microsoft has quietly confirmed the bug. The support notes for the optional June 2026 update KB5095093 state that the update “improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file”. The same fix will ship to all Windows 11 PCs with the July 2026 Patch Tuesday update on July 14.

How to check if you are affected

The file lives in a hidden system folder, so you won’t see it in a casual browse. Here is how to check its size:

  1. Open File Explorer and turn on hidden items via View > Show > Hidden items.
  2. Navigate to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager.
  3. Check the size of CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal. A healthy file is a few megabytes at most. If yours is in the gigabytes, you are affected.

If File Explorer refuses to show the folder because of permissions, run this command in a Terminal or Command Prompt opened as administrator — it only lists the contents without copying or changing anything, and the total bytes appear in the summary at the end:

robocopy "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager" "%TEMP%\CAMCheck" /L /B /R:0 /W:0 /BYTES /NP

Free disk-space analyzers such as WizTree or TreeSize (run as administrator) will also surface the file immediately if it has grown large.

Fix 1: Install the KB5095093 update (recommended)

Microsoft’s own fix both stops the runaway growth and performs a one-time cleanup of the bloated file, so this is the safest route:

  1. Go to Settings > Windows Update and click Check for updates.
  2. Install the optional preview update KB5095093 (released June 23, 2026 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2) and restart.

If you avoid optional updates as a rule, just wait a week: the same fix is bundled into the July 14 Patch Tuesday release, which installs automatically on all Windows 11 PCs.

Fix 2: Manually remove the file if you can’t update

The file is locked by the camsvc service while Windows is running, so you cannot simply delete it from the desktop. It can be removed from the Windows Recovery Environment instead, and Windows will recreate a fresh, small database on the next boot:

  1. Hold Shift and click Restart from the Start menu’s power button to reboot into recovery.
  2. Choose Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Command Prompt.
  3. Type bcdedit and press Enter to confirm which drive letter your Windows partition uses inside recovery (it is often D: rather than C: here — check the osdevice line).
  4. Run rd /s /q "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager", replacing C: with the letter you found.
  5. Close the Command Prompt and click Continue to boot back into Windows.

If the file keeps growing back

Deleting the file treats the symptom, not the cause. If it regrows quickly, something on your PC is hammering a permission — location is the usual culprit. Head to Settings > Privacy & security > Location and check whether an app you don’t need is constantly requesting access; users have also reported OEM utilities like Dell’s SmartByte triggering rapid regrowth. Do not disable the Capability Access Manager service itself, as that breaks app permissions and can cause network issues.

One honest caveat: removing the folder resets Windows’ record of recent app permission activity, and a few users have reported having to re-grant camera or microphone access to apps afterwards. That is a minor annoyance next to reclaiming hundreds of gigabytes — but if your file is only mildly inflated, installing the update and letting Microsoft’s cleanup do the work is the smarter play.

Sources: Windows Latest, TechRadar, WinTips