What is hibernate, hibernation and hyberfile.sys?

What is Hibernation?

Hibernation is a process that saves your current work into a non-volatile storage such as hard disk and shut down your computer. When boot up the computer it will resume the last saved work.

It is an advantage when you do a lot of task and you need to shut down the computer while you don't want to lose the work progress. But it takes time to do hibernation depends on how much work running and it takes about amount of storage to save the work in a file named hiberfil.sys .

When you do hibernation, the connection to the internet and running tasks will be stopped.

What is hiberfil.sys? 

Hibernation do save your current work and takes everything in memory and writes it to your hard drive as the hiberfil.sys file. If you have 512MB of memory, then hiberfil.sys will be about 512MB. If you have 2GB, the file will be around 2GB. The important point to remember is that even if you don't use hibernation, hiberfil.sys will still take up this huge amount of disk space. The way to remove the file is to turn off the hibernation feature.

In this post, I will show you how to delete the hiberfil.sys file and how to turn off hibernation. You can free up a few amount of space by doing this.

Delete Hiberfil.sys File

To delete this file, you have to use the command prompt to manually turn off hibernation. 

If you turn off hibernation via Power Options, it will not delete the actual file itself.

Using command prompt

• Type "command" in the search box. Right click Command Prompt and choose Run as Administrator.

• To disable hibernation, type the following command >>  powercfg –h off 
• This will disable hibernation and will remove the hiberfil.sys file from your system.

Using Power Options

• Open Control Panel >> System and Security >> Power Options. Or type power options in the search box in control panel windows. Click Change Plan Settings.

• Click on the Change advanced power settings link at the bottom.

• Expand Sleep and then expand Hibernate after. 
• Change the value of On battery and Plugged in to 0 minutes. 
• Note that the option will not even be available if you turned off hibernation using the command line.

• Click Apply and then OK. Then you are done.