Identifying Chrome extensions on Chrome OS eating up too much disk space
I just recently realized I had only 300 MB of free disk space on my Chromebook, when I should have about 8 GB of free disk space. After some investigation, I found that one of my extensions where not deleting its previous versions when it got updated. Here’s how you can detect and fix such an issue.
Type chrome://system into a Chrome tab, scroll down to “user_files” and click the “expand” button for it. This will generate a (quite long) list of files with file size. Then search for the following in in Chrome using alt+f:
G /home/
Please note, that’s a tab character between “G” and “/home/” in there. You may want to copy (ctrl+c) this from above in order to easily paste it (ctrl+v) into the search field. This will find any occurrences of gigabyte-sized folders and may reveal stuff which is taking up a lot of disk space.
If there is a result which looks something like this;
/home/chronos/user/Extensions/mfaihdlpglflfgpfjcifdjdjcckigekc
...you may do a Google search for that last string (mfaihdlpglflfgpfjcifdjdjcckigekc). You’ll probably find out which extension that is. You can also try to construct your own Chrome Web Store link, by placing that long string at the end of https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ which in this case would result in this link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mfaihdlpglflfgpfjcifdjdjcckigekc
So, this reveals we are dealing with a certain extension. Now, to fix this issue, remove that extension from Chrome (chrome://extensions) to see those gigabytes get free’d up.
You can re-install the extension, but perhaps you’ll see it keep eating up your disk space over time. It would be a good idea to notify the developers of the extension in question about the problem so that it will get fixed.