What was filling my 1 TB drive: developer and AI tools, not my files A developer built Sparewise, a free Windows app that reclaims disk space consumed by developer and AI tooling rather than personal files. Measuring a nearly full 1 TB laptop, the developer found Docker Desktop's disk at 77 GB, VirtualBox machines at 36 GB, a Hugging Face model cache at 32.5 GB, an 18 GB Recycle Bin, and over 15 GB of npm, pip, uv and Gradle caches. The app is distributed via the Microsoft Store and sparewise.app, and the developer advises compacting .vhdx files since deleting contents inside them does not return space to Windows. My laptop has a 1 TB drive, and one day Windows told me it was nearly full. I hadn't saved anything big. So where did it all go? When I finally measured it, very little of it was "my files". Most of it was stuff developer and AI tools leave behind and never clean up: | What | Size on my PC | |---|---| | Docker Desktop's disk | 77 GB | | VirtualBox machines | 36 GB | | Hugging Face model cache | 32.5 GB | | Recycle Bin | 18 GB | | npm, pip, uv, Gradle and other caches | 15+ GB | .vhdx files grow but never shrink by themselves, even after you delete images or files inside them. The rule I ended up with: only remove what comes back by itself. A cache that the tool rebuilds on demand is safe. Your projects, documents, photos, and anything that exists only on this PC are not, no matter how big. Some quick wins, by hand: npm cache clean --force pip cache purge docker system prune read what it lists first ollama list then: ollama rm