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In Windows 10, it is possible to view 30-day data usage on each network (e.g. Wi-Fi networks or Ethernet) and data usage by each program on this period. This can be seen at Settings -> Network & Internet -> Status (Data usage used to be its own tab, but moved under Status in 20H1). It can also be seen with downloads and uploads separate in Task Manager -> App History, by enabling the Downloads and Uploads columns and enabling Options -> Show history for all processes.

Now, in order to display data usage for last 30 days, Windows must be keeping daily (or more detailed) logs of data usage; otherwise, how would it know how much to subtract in order to remove data usage of 31 days ago? So, where can I find and how can I display those daily (or more detailed) logs?

(Specifically, I am trying to investigate some curious data usage that already happened, so installing a separate network monitoring tool to monitor future communications won't help me.)

Comments here implied that these logs are kept as Windows events (apparently disabling Windows Event Log disables data usage logging, and deleting Windows events via wevtutil command deletes data usage logs), but I could not find anything in Event Viewer that seemed to have any relevant data. This article also mentions the PowerShell command Get-NetAdapterStatistics, but that doesn't seem to help for this purpose either. I assume this data must be stored somewhere, but I couldn't figure out where to find it.

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Of course, NirSoft comes to the rescue! I finally found this utility, NetworkUsageView, that does exactly what I was looking for. Apparently data usage logs are kept in the SRUDB.dat file inside the Windows directory. I didn't examine the file itself, as the utility works well enough. It seems that logs are kept sometimes hourly, sometimes every five minutes; I don't know what determines the frequency. But it is easy to filter by date and program, and the status bar automatically shows the total usages for selected items, so a program's daily usage (or over whatever period) can be easily seen.

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  • This works well! You can paste the data in Excel to sum up daily Internet usage because it does it by hour. In fact, the website mentions "The network usage data is collected every hour by Windows operating systems". So Windows collects the data, and NirSoft NetworkUsageView simply displays them. You can find SRUDB.dat in C:\Windows\System32\sru\SRUDB.dat. Aug 29, 2023 at 20:32

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