Freeing up disk space in Windows

Overview

It seems like during the normal course of development there is no way to avoid pushing the limits of any system you create to work on. I find myself constantly needing more memory, faster CPUs and more storage. I have started to try to at least reign in my need for storage in my development environment. Storage is relatively inexpensive, but across multiple machines plus maintaining backups can make wasted space become a needless headache later down the road. To try to get ahead of this I setup a soft limit on the machine I do most of my work on of 160GB. This machine in practice should only have Windows, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL server and source code, but somehow lately I have managed to keep running out of space.

Tools

To figure out where all of my space is going my go to tool in windows is TreeSize: https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

To clean up the windows directory, which is usually near the top of the list in space I use PatchCleaner: http://www.homedev.com.au/Free/PatchCleaner

I also have a simple batch file that cleans out my source directory of bin and obj directories that can take up a surprising amount of space. The contents of the clean.bat file are:

FOR /F “tokens=*” %%G IN (‘DIR /B /AD /S bin’) DO RMDIR /S /Q “%%G”
FOR /F “tokens=*” %%G IN (‘DIR /B /AD /S obj’) DO RMDIR /S /Q “%%G”

Azure Storage Emulator

After using these tools I was able to keep within the limits I had set, but I noticed the Azure Storage Emulator was taking up around 10GB even though I had followed the process to clear it:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\Storage Emulator>AzureStorageEmulator.exe clear all

The culprits were the AzureStorageEmulatorDb files. The files (shown below) seem to indicate the azure storage emulator version they are associated with. They don’t seem to have much documentation available on them, so I wasn’t sure if AzureStorageEmulatorDb51.mdf or AzureStorageEmulatorDb45.mdf were still needed even though I am currently running “Windows Azure Storage Emulator 5.4.0.0” Reinstalling the Azure tools to get it running again would be a huge inconvenience, so  I tested moving the old mdf files to another directory and the emulator and verified the emulator was still running correctly. I did see some notes that running

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\Storage Emulator>AzureStorageEmulator.exe init

would rebuild the SQL backing if the current files were deleted, but they weren’t taking up very much space, so I didn’t have to find out.

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has helped you to recover some of the missing space on  your developer machine. If you’ve got additional questions about configuring developer tools, or the best way to setup a developer machine, Contact Us