Published by marco on
In the old days, we cleaned up our hard drives because we didn’t have enough space for all of our stuff. Our operating systems, applications and caches took up a reasonable portion of that hard drive.
Then we had gigantic hard drives with more than enough space for everything. Operating systems, applications and caches grew. Parsimonious software was no longer in vogue because it was a waste of time and money.
SSDs replaced hard drives, improving speeds drastically and ushering in a new era in performance. This did not come without cost, though. SSDs were much more expensive to make, so the affordable ones were necessarily much smaller than our existing hard drives. Our operating systems, applications and caches have not made the adjustment, though, at least not on Windows.
We are left with drives 70-80% smaller than the ones we had a couple of years ago—256MB vs. 1TB. Developers, in particular, tend to have software that uses space indiscriminately.
I recently noticed that my system drive had filled up to almost 80% and took a little time to do something about it. I downloaded TreeSize Free from Jam Software to get an idea of which folders took up the most space. I also referred to Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 by Scott Hanselman: there are a lot of great tips in there.
Without further ado, here are the locations that struck me as being “space hogs”—locations that were large but didn’t seem to offer much utility or seemed to be logs, caches or backups.
C:\Windows\Installer
/Program Files/Microsoft SQL Server/110/Setup Bootstrap
. If you have large databases, consider moving them to another drive or location and setting the default data directory to somewhere other than the Program Files directory on the system drive./Users/<username>/Roaming/Participatory Culture Foundation/Miro/icon-cache
/Users/<username>/Roaming/syntevo/SmartGit/updates
.I use this to keep track of my day, referring to it to fill out my timesheet. Screen captures are located in /Users/<username>/Local/TimeSnapper/Snapshots
. The default settings are to capture 100%-quality PNG files for all monitors every ten seconds. I have two large monitors and the default 5GB cache fills up in less than a day. This is not very helpful and wastes a lot of space. Instead, I recommend these settings:
\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\EWSoftware\Sandcastle Help File Builder\Cache
C:\Users\marco\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java
\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\SubMain\Cache
directory.\Users\marco\AppData\Local\JetBrains
. Feel free to throw away old installations and installers.This list is meant to show where space is being wasted on a Windows developer machine. I wasn’t able to find a way to remove all of these, but cleaned up what I could quickly clean up.
If you’re really tight on space, you can turn off hibernation—which uses 13GB on my machine—or reduce the size of the page file—which is 6GB on my machine. And, as mentioned above, Scott Hanselman’s guide is quite helpful.