Windows Recall has one big gotcha, and it’s not privacy

So far, the flagship feature of Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PC vision is Windows Recall, an AI-powered local search of your PC. But there’s a catch: Recall is going to suck up a lot of your PC’s storage space.

Recall was first shown off Monday at Microsoft Build as part of a massive Windows AI push introducing the Copilot+ PC generation. Think of it as a powerful local search engine for your PC. Ironically, in much the same way Google revolutionized search on the Web, Microsoft hopes to do the same for local search.

The Recall feature is currently in preview in Windows 11. It works by periodically taking snapshots of what your PC displays, then encrypting them and storing them locally. Microsoft has a lengthy explanation of what it does to preserve your privacy within Recall: allowing you to pause Recall, exclude Web sites (InPrivate mode in Edge is excluded automatically), and erase all of Recall’s screenshots from your PC. Your screenshots are encrypted, locked to your account, and (from what Microsoft tells us) not shared to the cloud.

The tradeoff is the ability to find just about anything that you didn’t save, Microsoft says, even if you don’t know what it is, exactly, or in what app it was stored. For me, this is extremely useful; there will be others who will probably find this horrifying.

Recall does have one gotcha, however, that appears like it will affect your PC regardless. Microsoft says that Recall will demand 50GB of your PC’s storage, and most likely use 25GB of it for active storage. That’s the reason that Microsoft requires 256GB of SSD storage for all Copilot+ PCs, executives told me.

That 25GB of Recall storage translates to 3 months of snapshots, typically, Microsoft says. For files which could be hidden months or even years ago would require a lot more space. We don’t know if Recall snapshots can be stored on an external drive, either.

SSD prices are already expected to spike; Recall won’t help. That may make PCs more expensive, and that’s never a good thing.