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Trying to clean up their hard disk, some users discover ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.bird is pretty big. In the order of too many Gigabytes. What is it?

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up vote 18 down vote accepted

'Bird' is part of the iCloud structure. You would have a large cache if there are pending documents to upload or process.

Over time, com.apple.bird cache is generally kept cleaner than your singing. Mine is 400 KB [that's K, not even M]

You can diagnose this with brctl - which has a diagnose command and a log command. Unless you are sure you have a bug in the cache - I wouldn't delete the files as they might cause you at best - another upload of the original content and at worst - cause errors or data loss of iCloud backed documents.

With that large a cache you should be able to dump and then monitor whatever categories/classes of data have the most size.

brctl dump

It's exceptionally verbose and you might not want to spend time learning what it does - but the data is quite helpful in determining what's actually happening and gives you an option before reaching out to AppleCare or another support tech in cases where you don't see the cache clearing itself over time.

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3  
Mine is 39gb! What's the point of iCloud if it stores that much locally, haha! – user169464 Feb 8 at 20:15
1  
I've made a substantial edit - with iCloud photo libraries of 150 GB and a fast network - I've seen a cache like that build up and then empty over several days. I wouldn't advice just deleting this cache as the code might re-sync even more data when it builds up the cache of work upon realizing the rug has been pulled out from under the cloud data sync. – bmike Feb 8 at 20:47
    
Well, I emptied mine and it grew back to 20gb or so. I only update documents, sometimes overwriting them after few minutes. It's like the cache is not ready for these cases. Too bad. 20Gb is a lot for a ssd disk. – hectorpal Feb 26 at 18:48
    
I have 250gigs :o – Dion May 19 at 13:17

Bird is part of iCloud and the files in the folder might be owned by any app using iCloud. I wrote a simple Python script to try and find out who owns the files in the directory:

$ python blame-bird.py 
4R6749AYRE.com.pixelmatorteam.pixelmator            0.00MB
com.apple.shoebox                                   0.00MB
com.apple.TextInput                                 0.00MB
iCloud.com.apple.iBooks                             0.00MB
57T9237FN3.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp                 6904.66MB

Accounted for: 6904MB.  Still unaccounted: 1879MB

So on my Mac WhatsApp is the biggest culprit. I filed a bug report with them (although I am not sure if it's really their fault).

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Awesome answer, awesome script. Whatsapp was also the issue for me: 57T9237FN3.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp 5164.78MB – LordParsley Aug 15 at 13:39
    
I have WhatsApp with more than 17 GB! 57T9237FN3.net.whatsapp.WhatsApp 17556.63MB – Lukas Aug 16 at 21:33
    
@bas: Great script! It's WhatsApp for me too ... how do you fix it? Just delete the com.apple.com folder? – DeepSpace101 Aug 31 at 14:31
    
A lot of people just delete all the files in the folder, but I'm not certain that is completely safe. You can file a bug report with WhatsApp. If enough people do that, then hopefully they will fix the bug which causes this. – bas Aug 31 at 14:36

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