Moving Docker in Windows
During my repeated testing with Docker Desktop, I'm often short on disk space
nd need to clean it over and over as described earlier.
The main reason is the rather uncontrolled growth of ext4.vhdx
that is located on my C: drive by default.
So I decided to move this file to a large external disk.
There are several ways to do this and a detailed guide:
https://devops.tutorials24x7.com/blog/how-to-change-docker-data-path-on-windows-10
I decided to choose option C) using symlinks.
I did it only partially, especially for my wild-growing virtual data disk.
this returned ~10GB on my C: drive and provided an additional 500GB space just for testing.
For my purpose, the slightly reduced performance is not important
as I typically check installation and functionality.
As a lateral result, I found tons of ages-old logs and temp files in <user>\AppData\Temp\
at least wasting another GB of disk space.
Comments
There is still another critical directory for Windows Docker Desktop
C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Temp\docker-scout\sha256
There some GB of Generated/Downloaded images are kept and NEVER cleared
I didn't miss anything when I deleted them manually after stopping Docker
getting back some more GB