Clearing out harddrive space (WoW folder)

[jaimelannister]

I travel a lot for work and in the interest of not going insane while I'm on the road, I've loaded WoW on my work laptop. It's a pretty decent machine (has a dedicated video card), so with the video quality turned down a bit it runs fairly well. I have, however, started to run into an issue with the tiny 80GB hard drive on this thing. Snooping around in my C: drive I've noticed that approximately 32GB are taken up by WoW, and so I'm wondering if this game really requires that much or are there some old/unused files in the WoW directory that I can discard.

I've already cleared out the patch downloader files in the main directory, but now I'm looking at a folder called "Updates" that seems like I should be able to trash because it also deals with old patches. Can I just trash that whole folder without disturbing my WoW install? Are there any other files/folders that I can prune out and gain some hard drive space back?

Any thoughts on possible places to look for non-WoW GB hogs (like temp folders)? If it helps, I'm running Windows 7.

Thanks for any and all help!

[RaZz0r]

you can delete the WTF Addons Cache and the Cache folder in the data you can also clear the files in the Errors folder you can also delete all the .old files and all the old patches and you can also delete the Screenshot folder

[Ilan]

Mine is at 26.9 GBs, but I probably have some unnecessary things within the folder myself. Best thing to do would probably be to reinstall it (I think you should only install Cata, and download latest patches), sure it will take some time, few days probably, but you'll free up ~10GB of space.

[Deleted]

Why don't you just upgrade the harddrive and DD the data from the old to the new one?
Also, my WoW folder is 25 gigs, and is a clean install with no old stuff + a bunch of AddOns.

[jaimelannister]

Why don't you just upgrade the harddrive and DD the data from the old to the new one?
Also, my WoW folder is 25 gigs, and is a clean install with no old stuff + a bunch of AddOns.

It's not my computer; it belongs to my place of employment. I am not allowed to change the hardware in it, sadly.

Sounds like I won't be able to get it much lower than 30GB anyway, so I guess I'll just have to deal with it as is.

Thanks for the help!

[TWBrien]

if you have the proper permissionss to attach an external drive that is also an option for WoW. A large flashdrive or slightly larger pocket hard drive may work. Hopefully the laptiop has USB 2.0 or an E-Sata(and you thought they weren't good for anything) port.

[Djinni]

I travel a lot for work and in the interest of not going insane while I'm on the road, I've loaded WoW on my work laptop. It's a pretty decent machine (has a dedicated video card), so with the video quality turned down a bit it runs fairly well. I have, however, started to run into an issue with the tiny 80GB hard drive on this thing. Snooping around in my C: drive I've noticed that approximately 32GB are taken up by WoW, and so I'm wondering if this game really requires that much or are there some old/unused files in the WoW directory that I can discard.

I've already cleared out the patch downloader files in the main directory, but now I'm looking at a folder called "Updates" that seems like I should be able to trash because it also deals with old patches. Can I just trash that whole folder without disturbing my WoW install? Are there any other files/folders that I can prune out and gain some hard drive space back?

Any thoughts on possible places to look for non-WoW GB hogs (like temp folders)? If it helps, I'm running Windows 7.

Thanks for any and all help!

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/939005-Clearing-out-harddrive-space-(WoW-folder)?p=12278244#post12278244
Is a list of all the files and folders you NEED TO KEEP in-order to run WoW, everything else can be safely removed. However files in WTF and Interface folders affect the way that WoW is displayed to you: resolution, addons to load for each character, where to place those addons, what settings they have etc..So removing the Interface and WTF folders is not recommended.

I would also download and run CCleaner if you haven't already http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner which will clear out alot of the useless junk you have laying around your harddrive your probably not even aware of.