Is After Effects Gobbling Up Your Hard Drive?

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Adobe After Effects CS3 Cache - Cache.MACC

I recently discovered that After Effects (CS3) wasn’t deleting it’s Media Cache files when I quit the application. The folder had swelled to 6.19 GB.

I’m not sure if this is a bug in CS3, or if all versions of AE suffered from this problem. But, if you’re an After Effects user you may want to make sure you haven’t (unnecessarily) lost some drive space. On a Mac, the folder is located at ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects CS3/Media Cache Files. You can either manually toss the content of the folder, or you can open AE on go to the Memory & Cache preferences and click, Clean Database & Cache.

17 thoughts on “Is After Effects Gobbling Up Your Hard Drive?”

  2. Yeah! I literally JUST found this out after a file from this folder wouldn’t defrag. I’m going to start checking on this folder more regularly!!

  4. Thank you so much for this… I had 189GB of memory and I was going crazy because I didn’t know how to delete it.

  7. But if you’re still working on the project and you delete those files, will he work be deleted also? Because I have 179GB and I’m not finished with my project. So if I delete the files, will all my work in the project also be deleted?

  8. @Tom – you can delete the files inside the “Media Cache Files” folder without losing your work. Those are meant to be temporary files – After Effects just isn’t deleting them for some reason. Anything your project requires will be rebuilt the next time you work on the project.

  10. I’m having the same problem when I open AE cs5 I still havn’t unchecked my show welcome and tip of the day box yet, after I open AE, so all of my recent projects that I have already deleted still show up on this page and can no longer be opened because they all have been deleted but are still showing up as recent projects. When I go to File/Open Recent Project, I can see all of those files that have been deleted are still there, but of coarse they can’t be opened because they have all been deleted. I even tried to right click on each one but nothing. I’ve searched my computer C-drive and can’t find them but I know they are still somewhere on my computer. In your reply up top is for Mac users I’m running windows OS windows 7 home premium 64 bit any advice will be helpful thanks.

  11. Charles, what you’re experiencing is a different issue. After Effects will always show the most recent files opened in that list. After Effects doesn’t check to see if those files still exist, it just shows what was recently opened, so the fact that the files are listed doesn’t mean they’re still on your computer.

    I don’t know of any way to simply clear the list, but if you open several files the old ones will get pushed off the list.

  12. Thanks for your quick response, I read that what you just said at the adobe.com help and support section, but I located all of those same type files in autosave in adobe premiere pro and deleted all of those recent project files that I had already deleted and since they would no open whats the point in staring at them every time I open PPro., but I located them deleted them manualy and now I can make a fresh start thats what I wanted to do in AE but I guess when I start a new project and save it one of those that has been deleted will disappear and the one currently saved will appear, but thanks again.

  17. Hello,
    The right question here, is : Why is AE6 (my version) create a cache of all the photo that are present on my computer ?

    Is there a way to block this ?

    Thanks for your time and support

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