Question Why is Unity taking up so much space on my computer?

Unity takes up about 39gb on my ssd. I had a look, and it seems like i have a bunch of subfolders called 2021.3.15f1, 2021.3.16f1, 2020.3.43f1, 2022.2.1f1, 2022.2.0b16 and 2023.1.0a24 inside of the unity folder.

It seems to be these subfolders that takes up so much space. Why?

 

Because you have 7 versions of Unity installed.

It's pretty common to have a number of versions installed. I must have a few dozen by now.

 

Each version is its own separate installation of Unity. An installation is around 5.5GB and you have seven of them therefore it's using about 39GB. That's not the only thing that will quickly eat up disk space. Assets downloaded from the store to be imported are also kept on the main drive.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AssetStorePackages.html

 

Can i delete some of them? It's been a while since I have updated Unity, so I guess that it must have happened the last time that I updated Unity.

 

Go ahead. You can uninstall versions from the hub by clicking the gear icon on the appropriate version under the Installs section.

Spoiler: Screenshot

 

Which one of them should I keep?

 

The one's you're using.

 

One thing worth mentioning, if you installed a unity version, the .exe for the install itself will stick around (even though it's useless now, you already finished installing) - it takes a good amount of space. It's almost like another duplicate unity install. I always try to remember to delete it when I need some space.

 

Is it best to install a version that has long term support?

 

Yes, for now that would be 2021.3 lts or 2020.3 lts

 

I went with version 2021.3.15f1, since that was the recommended version. I have uninstalled the rest. Unity only takes up about 14gb now.

 

The more reasonable thing to be upset about is how much disk space opening a simple project has sometimes been using....WHY is a small project using about 15GB of disk space for swap space when opened???!!!

 

Every project has at least two copies of the project's assets and packages: the source copy and a cache copy that is kept to accelerate performance of the editor and greatly reduce build times. Supporting additional platforms (by switching to that platform in the build menu) adds yet more files to the cache.