Clearing Disk Space

For a long time now I had very little disk space left on my 1 TB C drive where I install all programs. This meant I couldn’t install big games or programs even temporarily.

Turns out a lot of developer cache data accumulated across platforms and technologies. Clearing them out left me with a lot of free disk space - considerable breathing room.

%USERPROFILE% resolves to the user profile folder in C:\Users\<name> and can be entered in the File Explorer path or otherwise resolved from the environment variable USERPROFILE.

What helped me discover the relevant folders was WinDirStat - the classic tool to discover and analyze where your disk space is used. Pro-Tip: Disable the Treemap display for better performing interactivity when traversing the tree and deleting items.

%USERPROFILE%\.nuget

35 GB

dotnet nuget locals all --clear

%USERPROFILE%\mumble-vcpkg

64 GB

Simple delete

rm

%USERPROFILE%\.android

11 GB

%USERPROFILE%\vcpkg

8 GB

bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
git pull
.\vcpkg update
.\vcpkg remove --outdated --recurse
.\vcpkg update
=> 4 GB

%USERPROFILE%\.gradle

4 GB

gradlew cleanBuildCache
rm folder %USERPROFILE%\.gradle/caches/

%USERPROFILE%\.cargo

3 GB

cargo clean gc 

still unstable https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12633

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\vcpkg\archives

30 GB

https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/issues/14157

binary caches for the ports that you build

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\pip\cache

1.5 GB