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Lately, I have noted a lot of storage bloat on my system, to the point where it's becoming problematic for performance (in the sense that I'm running out of disk space for updates, new programs etc.). In an attempt to clean up, I used Disk Drill to get an overview, and it seems that the massive file bloat I'm seeing is related to XCode.

I rarely develop on my laptop, and if I do, I'm not developing Mac applications, so as far as I can gather, I have no use for XCode, so I uninstalled the program to free up space. This did help somewhat, but not to the level I expected.

Further investigation revealed that the majority of bloat (almost 220GB!) is taken up by files in the Library/InstallerSandboxes/.PKInstallSandboxManager/ folder.

In total, there are 8 subfolders, all named <someGUID>.activeSandbox, and each containing only three files. An Xcode.app in <someGUID>.activeSandbox/Root/Applications/ (this is the bloated file, tens of GB), an com.apple.pkg.Xcode.bom in <someGUID>.activeSandbox/Boms/ and finally a .SessionUUID in the activeSandbox/ base folder.

Now, the question is, if I can safely remove these <someGUID>.activeSandbox/ folders related to XCode? They look like temporary files to me.

As far as I can tell there is nothing in there that relates to anything but XCode which I no longer have installed on my system anyway.

What have I tried:

  • Repeated restarts after uninstalling XCode - no change, files stays
  • Restarts in Safe Mode after uninstalling XCode - Same as above, files persists.

So I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and manually remove these files?

Googling seems to provide conflicting answers to potential harm, but all the answers I found were several years old, so maybe someone here has new insights to share?

Note: I have had persistent problems updating XCode in the past, where the installer would basically be stuck on "installing" at around 99% for hours or even days. So these packages might be related to corrupted updates somehow.

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2 Answers 2

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Yes, you can delete the .PKInstallSandboxManager folder.

I don't see how this would help your system's performance though.

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  • Thanks for the reply, it's nice to get this confirmed. Maybe performance was a poor choice of words, it was more in the sense that I'm running out of disk space to install updates, or install pretty much anything, and felt I had removed most of what I could meaningfully remove. I'll update the question to reflect this.
    – AstroAT
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 13:35
  • In addition to the can I delete?, as in "Will the system will be OK if these particular temporary files are removed?", there is also can I delete? in terms of "What are the permitted administrator steps to remove such directories & files?". The "Delete file in PKInstallSandboxManager folder" question provides some answers to the second can I delete? context.
    – marc-medley
    Commented Jun 5, 2023 at 1:52
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Just a follow-up if others come looking, to confirm the answer from jksoegaard. I removed the files in the folder, and now, after almost a month of using my laptop, there have been zero problems associated with this.

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