WinButler

Reclaim your system drive.

An MFT-fast disk scanner, rule-driven junk cleaners, and junction-based folder redirection — built for Windows machines whose C: drive is chronically full.

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WinButler does three things most cleaners don't:

1. It reads the NTFS $MFT directly (like WizTree) instead of crawling the filesystem, so a full-drive scan of a million-file volume takes seconds, and every feature — cleaners, redirect sizing, the treemap — shares that one index.
2. It moves heavy folders instead of just deleting them. Redirect to Drive relocates a folder (an SDK, a package cache, a game) to another drive and leaves a real NTFS directory junction behind, so every app still finds it at its original path — with verification before anything is removed, and an undo ledger after.
3. It is paranoid by design. Dry-run is on by default and is a true no-op. A deny-list keeps SSH/GPG keys, credential stores, and browser login data from ever being offered, let alone touched. Risky items go to the Recycle Bin, not into the void. Every real deletion asks first and is logged.

Screenshots

Dashboard	Disk Explorer
Dev Junk	Redirect to Drive

Features

• Dashboard — total reclaimable and redirectable space at a glance, a disk-usage summary for the system drive, per-category cards that jump straight to each screen, and one-click Clean All.
• Electron Leftovers — finds the stale app-x.y.z build folders that Electron auto-updaters leave behind (VS Code, Discord, Slack, GitHub Desktop, …), keeps the newest version, and groups the rest by app for review.
• Temp Files & Cache Sweep — scan well-known temp and cache locations, classify every folder by risk through the JSON rule engine, and clean by risk level.
• App & Game Leftovers — a curated catalog of known junk locations outside the cache folders: crash dumps, installer leftovers, log piles, and drive-root debris.
• Dev Junk — per-tool cards (JetBrains, Android SDK, npm/yarn/pnpm, Cargo, Bun, vcpkg, …) showing on-disk size vs. safely reclaimable size. Anything that looks like a live git checkout is auto-locked out of bulk cleaning. Tools too big to clean get a one-click shortcut into the Redirect flow.
• Steam — finds every Steam library via libraryfolders.vdf and offers shader caches, download caches, dumps, and logs per library.
• Redirect to Drive — copy → verify (file count + byte count) → delete original → create junction, recorded in a ledger so any redirect can be undone later.
• Disk Explorer — a sortable full-drive breakdown plus a squarified treemap, built from the $MFT parse.
• System Tools — one-click DISM component cleanup, SFC, and Windows Update cache flush with live command output, plus an Explorer/MRU privacy sweep.

The safety model

Cleaning tools earn trust by what they refuse to do:

• Dry-run by default, every launch. The dry-run switch resets to ON at startup — a real-delete session never carries over. In dry-run, the cleaner returns before any filesystem mutation happens.
• Deny-list first. Paths matching credential material (SSH, GPG, credential stores, browser login/cookie data, …) are excluded on every scan path.
• Hybrid delete. Only items classified Safe (well-known GPU/shader caches and the like) are deleted permanently; Caution and Risky items go to the Recycle Bin.
• Junction-aware. Delete paths never follow a reparse point into its target — a junction is unlinked, never traversed.
• Confirm + log. Every real destructive action shows a confirmation dialog stating exactly what will happen, and is written to %APPDATA%\WinButler\logs.

Install

Grab WinButler-win.msi from the latest release and run it — no .NET runtime required. It installs to C:\Program Files\WinButler (expect one UAC prompt). Installed copies keep themselves current: WinButler checks for updates on launch, downloads them in the background, and offers a one-click "restart to update" (it never restarts on its own). Prefer no install? WinButler-win-Portable.zip runs from anywhere (no auto-updates).

Windows 10/11 only. The app self-elevates via UAC on launch — it needs all-user temp locations and NTFS junction privileges.

Run from source

Prerequisites: Windows 10/11 and the .NET 10 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/Advik-B/WinButler.git
cd WinButler
dotnet run --project WinButler.csproj

Configuration

All cleaning rules, the redirect catalog, and the known-locations catalog live in JSON under Data/definitions/ — no rules are hardcoded. The format is documented in Data/definitions/README.md; adding a new cache rule or redirect target is a JSON edit, not a code change. The load is fail-closed: if any definitions file is missing or unparseable, WinButler refuses to scan at all rather than run with a partial deny-list.

For developers

Architecture, build/test instructions, the testing strategy, and contributor gotchas live in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md. Want to contribute? Start with CONTRIBUTING.md — the easiest PRs are new cleaning rules, and they're pure JSON.

Acknowledgements

The App & Game Leftovers catalog, the Steam-aware cleaning, and the System Tools page began life as a study of FocusedWolf's comprehensive Windows cleanup batch script, which WinButler absorbed into its native, rule-driven (and dry-run-guarded) form. Thank you!

License

MIT — see LICENSE.