5,027,348,761 Reasons To Delete .AndroidStudioBeta

A fellow Android developer who was cleaning up his hard drive today (yes, drive space is still a limited resource) discovered that he still had an AndroidStudioBeta directory within ~/Library/Caches, and it was using 4GB of space. When he upgraded to Android Studio 1.0, it apparently created a new "AndroidStudio" cache directory, and didn't delete the old AndroidStudioBeta directory.

My friend is a Mac user. Curious whether the same problem affected Windows, I checked my user data directory, "C:\Users\Mark\", and discovered I had not two but three Android Studio data directories:
  • .AndroidStudio
  • .AndroidStudioBeta
  • .AndroidStudioPreview
I checked out the sizes on these directories, and found they were indeed quite large. The .AndroidStudioBeta directory was 5,027,348,761 bytes, and the .AndroidStudioPreview directory was 4,113,844,741 bytes. Android Studio writes out some pretty chunky cache files.

I renamed the .AndroidStudioBeta and .AndroidStudioPreview directories and fired up Android Studio, just to make sure it wouldn't complain about not being able to find some files. No complaints.

Satisfied that this was truly useless cruft, I shift-deleted the two old directories (to bypass recycling) and freed up 9GB of drive space.

P.S. Yes, I'm poking fun at the craze of starting article titles with a number. I can't stand it.

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