Disk Space Freeing Tips For Data Survivalists

It doesn’t take a lot of development to end up with a critically low amount of disk space. Depending on what you develop, you could face this scenario in a matter of months, and then the grim reality of living day-to-day with low space sets in, and you become a sort of data-survivor; making drastic decisions because you have know choice.

I’ve been operating in this mode for months now, because I have a phenomenally souped-up laptop with an Achilles heal hard drive of 250GB. Worse yet, I can’t upgrade.

So here are my best tips on how to live another day when you have no options but jettison ballast…

WinDirStat: The Last Honest App

You probably already have this little program, WinDirStat, with the world’s ugliest icon, and Pac-Man progress bars. And it is the only tool I trust to tell me the reality of my hard disk.

An icon only a developer could love.

Run it on the offending drive, and after a reasonable time, it will produce another ugly graphic which shows you a “colorful” tree map of your disk usage. You will spot quickly the worst-offending files because they will glare at you in alarmingly discordant color swatches, which hurt the eyes; and they should, because those files are hurting your drive.

But here’s the rub, depending on your company’s policies and Windows restrictions, there are some sources of pain that cannot be remedied. One glaring example is pagefile.sys, which is used for virtual memory.

Guess which file is pagefile.sys?

That said, windirstat shows you were to prune. You can see your disk contents arranged in blocks and when you click on them, it will show you where in the labirynth of folders the file exists.

There are other good options, but I recommend this utility to gain the necessary oversight of your starving hard drive’s vital signs.

When you’ve decided you can live without Outlook…

Let’s face it, without more space, your PC has no outlook. And when push comes to shove, you may be looking at that OST file under your Outlook directory with eyes like carving knives.

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\HumongousFile.ost

Because my company uses Office365, I am able to use the web client. The web client isn’t great (ss of writing this, I can’t setup an email signature in it), but like I said, I have to free up space, and having every email I’ve ever sent or received sitting on my hard drive is not an option.

So I learned to use the web client, and it’s actually not too bad. The new web integrations for office make previewing a file much better, and you can also open the file in the local app (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) with a single click from the preview.

Once you decide to eliminate the OST file upon which Outlook relies, you need to be aware of one trick Outlook has up its sleeve…

“Clever girl…”

Sure, go ahead, delete the file. Boom! Gigs back. Hooray! Much rejoicing! But then, next day, it’s back, and you’re in worse shape now because you celebrated by installing a bunch of stupid applications, didn’t you?

Still not dead.

The secret of OST’s regenerative ability is Lync (which is now called Skype for Business). There’s an option in Skype settings which will cause the OST to be recreated if it is found missing.

Disable that like so:

Exit out of Skype, delete the OST, restart Skype. OST stays gone now. Hopefully. [plot left open for sequel]

Hibernation is for bears.

Hibernation mode is a handy windows feature that allows your computer to go into a powered-off state, and then, when the season is right, awake with all your programs running as just like before, and then maybe tear open a few campers’ SUVs.

How does it do this? By creating a file as big as your PC’s total RAM, which is intolerably large!

But you can shut it off and get all of that bear-sized space back. Run CMD as Administrator, and execute the following command:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off
I can almost fit in this hard disk.

Not all of OneDrive needs to be synchronized.

The beauty of cloud storage is that it has so much space to offer. I use OneDrive, and I find it practical to have a couple folders kept in sync for convenience.

Make sure that you aren’t syncing the entirety of your OneDrive folder. You have to go into OneDrive settings and specify what folders it should keep in sync. Otherwise, you have gained zero advantage to using cloud storage.

Better to be embarrassed by poverty than by riches.

Additionally, the folders you do keep synced you have to practice good data hygiene on. So everything I discuss in the following tip is relevant to your cloud synced folder…

Now, about your Downloads folder…

I know, you’re going to tell me you’ve already deleted the big stuff out of here. But wait a minute, here’s an interesting theory for you to reflect upon: the Downloads folder is a window into your aptitude or lack thereof for managing your hard drive.

Psychobable, you say? Go to the folder. Take a look at the contents you decided not to delete and ask yourself. Why are they still there?

If you have some application install files that are hard to find, put them up on OneDrive or some other cloud storage. If the install file isn’t hard to find and you can with minimal effort download it again, delete the stupid thing. Don’t hoard your data!

I had 4 copies of Filezilla when I last checked. Is Filezilla going to vanish from the Internet? Is it going to become a SaaS (perpetually paid for program) like the Adobe Scrooge Suite?

No it’s not. Delete it.

Those documents you downloaded from Gmail. Are they yours? Then put them in a different folder. Are they from someone else? Then delete them, because you can very easily find the email they were attached to and redownload them IF NEEDED.

Survival is about need.

Need. Survival is about need. There is no room for convenience. Either move the document to a better place, or delete it.

Data hygene starts with the Downloads folder, the way health starts with diet. The Download folder is like your mouth. Files are like food. If you need the food, store it, if you don’t…well, you know what a body does.

Remove old versions of programs, if you can.

In most cases, you don’t need old versions of programs. Sometimes you do though.

Generally, this problem is most accute for developers because we don’t always have the option to upgrade our projects to a later version of an IDE, and IDEs are the fattest of resource hogs in the application pen. But if you’re still hanging onto VS2010, and you haven’t used it in the last 6 months. It’s time to make the survivor’s choice.

Here’s a more challenging scenario: VS 2015 and VS 2017. In some cases I’ve seen, there are projects I simply cannot port, usually this happens on team projects that are archived in TFS.

If you can’t remove it, don’t. But here’s what I can do. I can remove those VS2015 projects, because…they’re on TFS. Which brings me to the next tip…

Delete projects that are *safely* under source control.

Man, the whole point of Git, TFS, or (heaven help you) SVN, is that you transfer authority of the files to a central repository. It’s safe! The reason it exists is so you don’t have to data hoard versions of your code. Including the latest versions. If you’re not actively working on the project, and the latest changes are checked in, simply delete the local copy.

Yes, it’s a hassle to pull it back down, but this goes back to data hygiene. It’s also a hassle to make your bed in the morning, and shave, and keep your car passenger worthy.

Strangely enough, it’s an upside to not have a choice. You need space. You need to incur some inconveniences to get it. Take a chainsaw to your file tree…for the good of the tree!

Some trees deserve the chainsaw.

Android Studio hates your hard disk.

AVD Block Party

I like Android Studio, but Android Studio hates my PC.

Besides being a massive pile of bytes, Android Studio spawns virtual device images for emulation purposes, and a single instance of a android device image takes up an ever more expansive amount of space.

AVD Block Party Location. Be there, and be square-ish.

Apparently, Google’s Android team has found it most conducive to development to appropriate every byte a device could possibly utilize in order to provide you an emulated version.

Now, I won’t be as drastic as some developers who flat out refuse to use the emulator, I don’t think that’s reasonable (although it is arguably better practice to use a real device). I also understand that some images you may have configured specially because you were building for a non-common device. So take notes, or screenshots even, of those configuration settings, and remove the images until you need them again.

Nervous Database is logging itself.

If you work with Microsoft SQL or MySQL, be aware that both of them will produce snapshots of their databases under certain circumstances, such as an application crash.

These files are generally small, but could grow into a big problem. And you don’t need them.

For Microsoft SQL, the files are named SqlDump<some number>.mdmp

For MySQL, the files are named mysql-bin.<some number>

CrashDumps

Some programs will save snapshots of files in progress when they crash. This is not a uniform practice, but I’ve spotted the place where most apps are putting their “crash dumps” in a folder called “CrashDumps” (in the local app data folder).

C:\Users\<your-user>\AppData\Local\CrashDumps

Presuming you haven’t just experienced a program crash, you can clean this folder out. Depending on which program crashed, it could be claiming a sizable chunk of your drive.

The bigger they are the larger they crash.

Windows tries to help.

I’m assuming, at this point, that you have muscle memory for launching Disk Cleanup utility. And hopefully, you have admin privileges over your computer to get the bonus cache of junk files. This is usually slim pickings though. But just in case, you should know about Windows’ ‘Disk Cleanup’ app, and also setup your Disk Defragmenter to run regularly.

We take what we can get.

WinSxS (Windows 10)

WinSxS folder on Windows 10

Windows SxS (Side-by-Side) is an unhappy compromise of an OS caught between 32 and 64 bits, and a library of legacy to boot.

On Windows 10, you will quickly notice this teaming colony of files, small but many.

There are lots of tips for slimming down this multi-stomached digestive system, but the quick one is to run the following from the command line (with Admin privelages) which will remove cached components that have been updated to newer versions…

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup 

Edge Cases: Other Strange Space Eaters

Here’s where I alienate the general audience and report some strange edge cases that being I have had to deal with as a disk space survivalist.

The most unnerving one is this: at one point in my efforts to save space, I came across wave files that were massive. Surprised to find them, I listened to one, and honestly, it sounded like me using my computer. It was ambient, like a room, and had occasional sounds of life. After a few seconds, I was sufficiently creeped out, I stopped listening.

Maybe it’s a Cortana thing, or some other mic resource gone awry. All I really know is that my computer didn’t need gigantic WAV files in order to improve my user experience.

In the rare case that you also have these files, you know that they reside in the Windows\Temp folder.

To handle them, I simply wrote a 1 line bat file to delete them and scheduled it to run on logon and every 2 hours.

del /f "C:\Windows\Temp\*.wav"