It’s amazing how much crap accumulates on our computers. While working on something, I hit an unexpected ‘out of disk space’ error, so I started poking around trying to find stuff to get rid of so I could free up some space. It didn’t take long, and I figured I may as well spend a bit of time tidying up my whole system.
After I was finished I had deleted over 19 gigs of files. This system only has a 40 gig drive to begin with. Multi-megabyte trace files from bugs long since fixed, database snapshots from customers from years ago, source code from previous versions that’s no longer needed, online manuals I’d saved to disk and only used briefly, ten-line test programs written to quickly check something, software installed and used once and then forgotten, temp files from programs that failed to clean up properly, and all sorts of other junk was hiding about in the nooks and crannies of the filesystem.
It’s especially fun when you find files with no immediately obvious use, in a vaguely-named folder, with no documentation. Anything I couldn’t figure out within 30 seconds got thrown in the recycle bin.
Of course it’ll probably only take me a couple more months to fill the drive back up with junk again…
I doubt it’s much consolation, but try working with a 20G drive that’s always full….