If you are a programmer and use MS Visual Studio (especially the latest versions thereof), there is more opportunity for clean-up. Take for example the pic to the right, representing the disk usage of a single VS2010 project for DeskRule. The source code is 4MB and the executable end result is under 2MB but the total space used is 1GB (!) — a thousand times bigger!
xplorer² Tools > Folder statistics menu command has identified the subfolders that take up most space. If we want to get more details we can issue a search command for file sizes >10MB, and this is what we get:
deskrule.sdf 247,287,808 SQL Server Database deskrule.ilk 12,945,388 Incremental Linker File deskrule.pdb 31,641,600 Program Debug Database deskrule.pch 67,174,400 Precompiled Header File deskrule-3dd8aecb.ipch 124,387,328 more precompiled ------- TOTAL BYTES 483,436,524 See how 5 files out of the 400 that comprise the project, occupy half the used space. They are intermediate files associated with intellisense, precompiled headers and so on. Now multiply this with a few 100s of old visual studio projects and you can see how that expensive SSD drive will fill up quickly! Sometimes I keep PDB files despite their lard, for post-mortem debugging There's not much point deleting visual studio intermediate files if you actively work with a project. They will just be rebuilt next time you compile. However, if you have old projects that you haven't worked on for a while (and it is unlikely you'll ever work with them again), then deleting the temporary files makes sense and can free up a lot of disk space. |
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With xplorer² it is easy to selectively delete the huge files without touching the smaller or important ones. One possibility is to find file sizes >=10MB and delete the search results. Or you can use the robust deletion function, which accepts a file filter, to target only the known large files for deletion. You can include multiple file types as a comma separated wildcard list, as such:
*.sdf,*.ilk,*.pdb,*.ipch,*.pch
Select the root solution folder, press <SHIFT+DEL> keys, and use the above list of file extensions in the robust deletion dialog, and only these files will be deleted.
For a more thorough cleanup you can also remove object (*.obj) files and lots of other visual studio junk. At the extreme you only need to keep the source code files, and all the rest can be re-created building the solution!
Best season's greetings everyone!
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