How to fix “We couldn’t find any folders to show you” in Storage Settings on Windows 10

The Settings app on Windows 10 gives you an excellent, visual look at how storage is being consumed on your system. In fact, if you connect an external hard drive to your system, the storage feature extends to it as well. It’s a good feature but it has its occasional hiccups. On occasion, when you try to view which folders are taking up space on a drive, you get the “We couldn’t find any folders to show you” message. The Settings app shows you nothing else and you can’t view the folders that are taking up space. Here’s how you can fix it.

Fix “We couldn’t find any folders to show you”

Any one of these fixes might do the trick. Try them all.

Close and re-open Settings

The Settings app may give you a visually aesthetic view of how storage is used on your system but it doesn’t do well when it comes to updating the storage usage live. Often, if you delete a folder, the app either hangs or it doesn’t update the storage usage post deletion. The “We couldn’t find any folders to show you” problem might simply go away if you close and re-open the Settings app. It’s also worth restarting your system.

Update Storage Controller driver

Open Device Manager and look for Storage Controller. Expand it and select the device under it. Double-click it to open its properties. Go to the Driver tab and click Update Driver. Windows 10 will look for a driver updates that may be available and install them. Restart your system and you should be able to see the space usage in the Settings app.

Remove external drives and devices

The storage tab can accurately display space used for external drives however, sometimes they do cause problems. If you have any external drives and devices connected to your system, remove them, restart your system and then open the Settings app. It should now display the folders that are taking up space on your system.

This is a pretty simple error and it shouldn’t be too hard to fix. The above three fixes, simple as they are, ought to do the trick. In rare cases, this might have to do with folder permissions in which case you will have to manually track down the folder that the Settings app is unable to access. Outside this one exception, there’s not much the can block storage information from being reported in the Settings app.