I've saved 13% disk space on my Mac today

Today, I've cleaned 65GB safely and I feel better now. That's ~13% of my disk space.

See this big gray "System Data" space? That's where I've been cleaning a lot stuff.

What's annoying as a developer, is that it keeps growing and that the built-in MacOS storage space optimization tools don't really get it.

And I never really took time to understand it before it was my last viable option before buying a bigger Mac.

Yesterday, even the 'magical' Store in iCloud didn't change a thing.

So I had to figure out what was going on.

Back to terminal

I've been playing with Ollama, Docker a lot over the last 6 months.

And, I'm still coding a lot using VS Code, XCode and now Cursor, in Python, JS, and other things I'm trying out.

Well, I've cleaned the XCode cache easily with MacOS tools. But that's not enough.

Where is all this System Data usage?

First, everything that's in the /Users/<user_name> space is in Documents except the hidden files that goes into System Data.

It's a real thing when you are using developer tools that rely a lot on ~/.<tool_directory> to store local data.

That's how you can find the big ones.

Diagnostic 1: List all the hidden directories with their total size.

cd
du --si -s \.*

For me everything above 1GB is worth having a look, I've learned a few things

1. Docker

I'm familiar with docker system prune but this doesn't change the size of the ~/.docker directory.

There's this big scout directory, with obviously a cache to be cleaned:

docker scout cache prune

See more info in Docker doc

2. Ollama

I'm using a lot of models, but some where old, and I just never thought about cleaning them properly:

ollama list
ollama rm <model_name>

This properly cleans up the hidden directory.

3. VS Code

Extensions take a lot of space and uninstalling them in the IDE doesn't remove old versions or unused extensions.

cd ~/.vscode/extensions
du --si -s *

Look at all the big ones. For example, I've tried VS Code Speech once, uninstalled in IDE, but the model seemed to stick here.

4. NPM

Another big one, a _cacache file in the ~/.npm/ folder.

Thanks to these guys' discussion on GitHub, I've realized there's another cache used by npm:

npm cache clean --force

Next?

I think about a daemon running on my laptop that would monitor the space usage of these hidden directories and recommend to take actions.

Let's see if there's something fun to build along those lines :)