Who Discovered the Sketch Cache Hog!
Thomas Degry, a HERO front end developer from iStrategyLabs, discovered that Sketch took over 200GB of storage on his colleague's MacBook. And after his genius logic reasoning, he noticed that macOS stores a huge amount of cache files for Sketch, TextEdit, KeyNote, Pages, Numbers, and some other programs in DocumentRevisions-V100 folder, an internal version control system introduced by Apple in OSX Lion.
In this adventure, Thomas ended up doing some clean installs to clean up Sketch caches and he highlighted that Version control is absolutely useful. The trade off between hundreds of gigabytes of storage being taken and disabling version control depends on the storage capacity and availability of your Mac.
*Resource: How Sketch took over 200GB of our MacBooks
The First App Built for Sketch Cache Cleaning
Co-built by Yuriy Oparenko (Idea & design) and Sasha Prokhorenko (Development), Sketch Cache Cleaner is the first macOS app that deletes hidden Sketch history files that can take a lot of space on your hard drive and that you would probably never use. It earned more than 700 Upvotes and rewarded as #3 Product of the Day on ProductHunt.
After a quick success in Design community, one Github user reported that this Sketch Cache Cleaner app basically destroys any revision of any document from any app in the whole operating system. Also, there are reports about unexpected side effects on the system (crashes, slowdowns) after removing the contents of that folder.
Omni Remover Brings
A Better Solution
Great idea should be carried forward. So when developing our Mac Uninstaller app named Omni Remover, we took one more step closer by enabling it to clean out only specific and safe-to-remove cache junk in DocumentRevisions-V100 folder. As the ideal result, Omni Remover will neither put hand on the Versions database from other apps, or cause potential issues upon users macOS file system.
With the Sketch Clean feature in Omni Remover, you can clear revision history for all Sketch documents on your Mac. This can potentially recover gigabytes of free space. In addition, if you also use Xcode intensely, you can also give a try with the Xcode Clean.