Google Chrome and the missing hard disk space
Tuesday, June 14th, 2016 | Tech
I was recently clearing space on my laptop hard drive when I noticed Google Chrome was taking 20gb of space. You read that correctly: 20gb.
After some searching, people suggested it could be old versions of Chrome. You can see into the package by right-clicking on it and clicking “Show Package Contents”. Inside I did indeed find dozens of old versions of Chrome and deleted them all. However, this only brought the size down to 19gb.
I wondered if the cache might be stored inside the app. I wouldn’t expect it to be, as typically it is stored in the user directory. However, when I went to clear out the cache, it only had 400mb in it away, so that ruled out that as a problem.
Next, I went through all the files in Finder to see if I could spot any large files. I could not. This made me suspicious, so I opened up terminal and checked it from there.
cd /Applications
du -sch ./* | grep Chrome
195M ./Google Chrome.app
Google Chrome isn’t actually using the space: Finder is just reporting it incorrectly. However, it clearly showed up on Daisy Disk before, and disappeared after I cleared out all of the old versions. So whether they were contributing or not I’m not sure.
I was recently clearing space on my laptop hard drive when I noticed Google Chrome was taking 20gb of space. You read that correctly: 20gb.
After some searching, people suggested it could be old versions of Chrome. You can see into the package by right-clicking on it and clicking “Show Package Contents”. Inside I did indeed find dozens of old versions of Chrome and deleted them all. However, this only brought the size down to 19gb.
I wondered if the cache might be stored inside the app. I wouldn’t expect it to be, as typically it is stored in the user directory. However, when I went to clear out the cache, it only had 400mb in it away, so that ruled out that as a problem.
Next, I went through all the files in Finder to see if I could spot any large files. I could not. This made me suspicious, so I opened up terminal and checked it from there.
cd /Applications du -sch ./* | grep Chrome 195M ./Google Chrome.app
Google Chrome isn’t actually using the space: Finder is just reporting it incorrectly. However, it clearly showed up on Daisy Disk before, and disappeared after I cleared out all of the old versions. So whether they were contributing or not I’m not sure.