Win 11- Can I delete containers in the C drive?!

airborne

airborne

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I'm running out of space on my 512GB Win 11 OS drive, aka the C drive and I used TreeSize to have a look what is taking up the space and I noticed a folder called Containers that's using 47GB of space, I checked under Windows Features and the option for "Containers" and "Container Server" is not installed so why would I still have these massive container files, also it looks like they have been recently written to so are being used currently in some form?

Can I delete these files and if so what's the safest way to go about that without nuking my OS?

Containers.png
 
What do you use on Windows that use container images or layers? It could be Docker, or any other development tool. I am unsure about the above, but I can't remember Windows Server Containers structured like that.
 
Fulcrum29 said:
What do you use on Windows that use container images or layers? It could be Docker, or any other development tool. I am unsure about the above, but I can't remember Windows Server Containers structured like that.
Click to expand...
I used Hyper-V manager to mount a container at one point but the VM files which are very large are on a separate drive, are these files on the C drive possibly linked to that VM, if I unmount it will it purge all these files on the C drive?
 
The files are stored at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Containers
 
airborne said:
I used Hyper-V manager to mount a container at one point but the VM files which are very large are on a separate drive, are these files on the C drive possibly linked to that VM, if I unmount it will it purge all these files on the C drive?
Click to expand...

That isn't structured like a Hyper-V directory. You select where the virtual hard disk is stored, and then you need to select where Checkpoint File and Smart Paging File are located.

From your image, there are layers.
 
Something on your system is using the container-related services. What it is, I won't know.
 
Sinbad said:
Ogres?
Click to expand...

Yeah, and according to the screenshot, there is a layer that is actively making changes. That is typical Docker/Kubernetes behaviour or some dev environment. It is 46GB, so I can't see that it is an anti-virus/malware sandbox, unless it is. That said, it could also be a virus that is utilizing the container-services.

He should check what it is in the layers, but there is a slight chance that it could be compressed or encrypted, pending.
 
SauRoNZA said:
And under the files sub-directories? There should be some hints as to what it is.

Going by the dates the first two are clearly actively running.

What does "docker ps" in the command line show you?
Click to expand...
I get "'docker' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file."
 
airborne said:
I get "'docker' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file."
Click to expand...

Check what is in the Files directories. Then you should know what the content is that is contained within the image layer. Therein you will gather clues.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Oh Lordy, seems like a Windows container…didn’t even know that was possible.

Surely there is a GUI for this?
Click to expand...
Windows does now natively support Containers but you have to enable that via the "Turn Windows features On and Off" settings, I didn't have them enabled but I'm going to enable them and then disable them to see if that may remove them
 
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