[Help] Brave Browser is taking up too much space in Windows C drive — can I delete its cache folder?

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r/brave_browser - [Help] Brave Browser is taking up too much space in Windows C drive — can I delete its cache folder?|750xauto

r/brave_browser - [Help] Brave Browser is taking up too much space in Windows C drive — can I delete its cache folder?|750xauto

Hey everyone,
I was running out of storage space on my Windows C: drive, and after some digging, I found that the Brave Browser is taking up a huge amount of space there — especially in the cache folder.

I’m wondering:

  • What exactly is this data?
  • Is it important or just build-up from regular usage?
  • Can I safely delete the cache folder without breaking anything?

Appreciate any insights from those who’ve dealt with this before. Thanks!

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@naresh608

See: ‘https://superuser.com/questions/1608022/how-to-clear-chrome-chromium-edge-service-worker-cache’

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@naresh608 thank you for reporting.

In short – it’s just another place where data is cached. As the parent directory is Service worker, this is likely code that was cached by a site you visited and/or an extension installed to help the browser display information or run/load the site more quickly. There are a variety of ways to cache this type of data and via service worker is one of them.

Just build-up from regular usage, although that is quite a lot of built-up you’re showing there. For comparison, my Service worker\Cached storage directory shows numbers like 611MB, 38.1MB, 200MB in some of my profile folders.

Yes – it is perfectly safe to clear. As suggested in the thread @289wk shared, if you are worried it might break something (again, it’s just cache data so it is not likely to have any noticeable effect with respect to your browsing/browser data), you can make a copy of that directory that you can restore in the event for some reason something breaks.

I would recommend going into the directory and deleting the contents rather than the folder itself.

Additionally, it is strange to me that this cannot be cleared from within the browser. The Cached images and files option in brave://settings/clearBrowserData should do exactly that but it doesn’t appear to. I’ll be filing an issue for this shortly.

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Issue filed here for review:

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