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Delete caches and save disk space
Authored by: TigerKR on May 01, '06 09:34:10PM

Just for reference, I will reiterate what has already been said about the long-term importance (or lack there of) of files in the ~/Library/Caches directory.

Recently I discovered a bug in an application (the producer of said application was "some kind of fruit company" who shall remain nameless), and the top level tech that I was working with confirmed that its no big deal to delete the contents of the ~/Library/Caches directory.

I'm not advocating that you empty the directory and then lock the folder so that it can never be populated, nor am I advocating that you empty the directory at all. I'm simply stating that you can empty the directory and its not a big deal.

If your Caches folder is out of control, then you should think about some sort of cleaning.

For comparison purposes, here are the current sizes for my (Mac OS X created) Caches folders:

/Library/Caches
24.7 MB

/System/Library/Caches
11.6 MB

/private/var/root/Library/Caches
16 KB

~/Library/Caches
80.2 MB

The oldest directory within the ~/Library/Caches directory was modified Apr 4 2006.



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Delete caches and save disk space
Authored by: sjk on May 02, '06 10:56:47AM

I'd be cautious deleting ~/Library/Caches/Metadata because it contains Spotlight proxy files used by iCal, Safari, and other apps. Something will eventually trigger those files to be regenerated but before that happens Spotlight searching may be temporarily crippled. I discovered that awhile ago with Safari bookmarks and eventually deleted and restored the Bookmarks.plist file to force proxy files to be rebuilt after other methods had failed to do it.



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