Cleaning Workstation Cache

[Mongo424242]

Hi all,

I apologize if this has been asked and answered a hundred times, but my searches turned up empty. I have noticed recently that my hard drive space has been decreasing dramatically, and finally found out why. I am building a Windows 7 Gaming VM, and have been transferring a great many files (either into the VM itself to help with installation, or simply from an external HD to a directory on the host (Ubuntu 20.04) using the VM Internet Exploder). I didn't think anything of it, until I looked at the disk utilization. I have accumulated 40GB of stuff in the vmware/drag&drop subfolder of the .cache directory. Note that I do not use drag&drop in the first place...? This picture does not change whether the VM is open, if Workstation is shut down, or even after a fresh boot before Workstation is brought up. My question is, how do I clean this out, and is there a way to tell Workstation to do it automatically (some of this stuff hasn't been touched in quite a while)? Thanks!

Mongo

[wila]

Hi,

First off I agree that it would be nice if VMware would automatically clean this up on shut down or startup or even add a little script to do this at system shut down or ....

Sadly that isn't the case and you'll have to write that your self (can be a single line like "rm -rf /folder/to/delete/all/filesandsubfolders/*")

also:

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Note that I do not use drag&drop in the first place...?

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All clipboard actions and drag and drop, first copy to that "cache" location before copying it to the final location. So copy & paste between host & guest will also do this for you, or copy & paste between different VM's.

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Wil

[Mongo424242]

Hi wila,

Thank you for your expertise once again!  Are you saying that I can simply delete files/folders from the /home/mongo/.cache/vmware/drag and drop/... directory in order to clean it up?  I am assuming that I should be out of all VMs and have Workstation shut completely down...

Mongo

[wila]

Hi,

Yes you can delete the contents of the folder.

I doubt that it matters much if Workstation is shut down, but it is not a bad idea to be careful.

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Wil