How to Reclaim Hundreds of GB on Your C Drive by Cleaning JetBrains IDE Files

1. C Drive Turns Red

While coding, IntelliJ IDEA warned that only 50 MB of free space remained on the C drive. Even after cleaning with a system cleaner, the drive remained full. The author had recently expanded the partition from 120 GB to 178 GB, which filled up quickly.

The first suspect was WeChat, known for consuming storage on mobile devices, so the author changed the storage directories for WeChat and Enterprise WeChat, freeing about 15 GB, but further cleaning tools could not reclaim much more.

2. Identify the Culprit

Using SpaceSniffer, the author discovered that the JetBrains suite's runtime directories occupied 65 GB on the C drive.

3. Clean the Directories

On Windows the default directory is

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\JetBrains

, and on macOS it is

~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains

. These folders contain many old version runtimes. The author deleted the old version directories and later explains how to modify the location.

Warning: Deleting old versions directly can be risky; if you have just upgraded, first launch the new IDE so it copies configuration, then delete the old directories to avoid errors or loss of settings.

After removing all old JetBrains suite directories, the C drive space was restored.

If you use JetBrains Toolbox to manage IDE versions, you can also clean residual directories via Toolbox settings.

4. Change IDE Default Configuration, Plugin, and Cache Directories

4.1 In Toolbox you can select a custom location for the IDE configuration and JVM options file.

4.2 If you do not have Toolbox, edit

${install_dir}\bin\idea.properties

to set the following properties:

idea.config.path

idea.system.path

idea.plugins.path

idea.log.path

Example:

<code>idea.config.path=d:/work/idea/caches/trunk-config
idea.system.path=d:/work/idea/caches/trunk-system
idea.plugins.path=d:/work/idea/caches/trunk-plugins
idea.log.path=d:/work/idea/caches/trunk-logs
</code>

These entries are commented out by default; you need to uncomment and adjust the paths.