Reclaim Disk Space After Creative Suite 4 Updates – Remove AdobePatchFiles

Note: Since this was first posted, this tip has been by-far the most popular post on Dirty Words Design, saving designers terrabytes of storage space! If you’ve found this tip really useful, a small Amazon Gift Card to adam@adamjury.com would be a great way to show your appreciation.

Adobe regularly gets beat upon for the Creative Suite installer and updater, which is by itself a large piece of software managing even larger pieces of software. I won’t even pretend to understand how they all tie together, but Adobe does have a new-ish Adobe Installation and Licensing blog that discusses issues that relate to the installer.

I don’t like spending a lot of time complaining about the installer and upgrader, bcause frankly—I don’t encounter them that often. In terms of Time Spent With Creative Suite, installing and upgrading is a fraction of a percent. But—there’s always that but—I just did a fresh install of Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro (Not my main production machine) and I took some screenshots of the install process, to illustrate a quick and easy way to reclaim some disk space after installing Adobe Creative Suite 4 updates.

Now, if I’m installing about 220MB of updates, even assuming that all of the download is compressed, it should also be assumed that some of the updated files are replacing already existing files, not creating entirely new files on the drive. So in the following screenshot, you’ll see that roughly 300MB of disk space has been taken up after the update … and there’s also a mysterious hidden directory in my Creative Suite folder — “.AdobePatchFiles”

I use PathFinder as a Finder replacement, which easily allows me to see hidden files and directories. If you’re using the regular Finder, this Lifehacker tip will show you how to make it show hidden files.

You’ll also note that I install all the Creative Suite apps into a folder called /Applications/Creative Suite/, to help keep my /Applications/ folder more tidy. If you install in the default /Applications/ folder, the the .AdobePatchFiles/ folder will be /Applications/.AdobePatchFiles/.

The patching process is finished and Adobe Updater is closed, so let’s take a peek in that directory:

Well, that’s more than the entire download size! Let’s dig a bit deeper:

Boy, those files look … like temporary files that didn’t get properly cleaned up.

Delete the entire directory and gain that space back. No ill benefits that I’ve found — and even though I only saved about 260MB, remember that I only installed some of the Creative Suite 4 updates; I skipped the apps I’m not regularly using at this time. Had I installed more updates, that directory would be even larger.

Reclaim Disk Space After Creative Suite 4 Updates – Remove AdobePatchFiles

Published:: 06.09.09

Category:: Tips & Tricks

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Jean-Claude Tremblay 28.09.09 / 5am

Thanks Adam, for that tips. I save over 550mg on my hd with it.

Jason Sheldon 02.11.09 / 4am

Wow – thanks for this. I’ve just noticed this folder, a whopping 2.3gb!!! Wanted to know it’s safe to delete, and your post confirmed it! Thanks very much!

Joel 05.01.10 / 10am

2.8 GB! Asif I didn’t hate Adobe’s installer technology enough!

Aylwin Lo 10.01.10 / 9pm

I’ve just done the same and saved 1.11 GB.

However, I think it’s worth a warning that one should have their original CS4 disks, and probably a backup before attempting anything like this: patch files, as one might expect, keep track of the differences between different versions of your CS apps. Deleting these files could cause future CS app updates to fail.

AdamJury 10.01.10 / 11pm

Aylwin, do you have access to or links to documentation that says any unique/necessary data is included in that directory? Anecdotally, nobody has made any comments here about future upgrades not working, and I haven’t had any such problems on the two machines I’ve done this on.

Even if that directory was deleted, the exact version of every Creative Suite app is included in the info.plist file that is inside each application package — that’s a far more logical place for the updater to look to find what version the current install is.

After all, the mere presence of the .AdobePatchFiles directory doesn’t perfectly indicate if the patch was installed, I don’t believe … a crash during the install would leave the entire directory there, with only some files applied.

That all said, if you ran into some future problems and told Adobe tech support that you’d deleted said files, I’m sure that they would say “We don’t know if that may have caused your problem, and we don’t advocate doing that, so you’re out of luck.”

(Adobe have popped into Dirty Words before to tell me when I was full of shit — politely and professionally — and they’ve yet to do so for this post …)

Patrick Rushton 08.02.10 / 4am

Thanks for this. Just saved me 2,9GB!

» This week’s links petersteinberger.com 06.04.10 / 11am

[...] Delete Adobe Creative Suite CS4 Patch Files Grrr. space is limited on a SSD. There’s just no reason for Adobe to keep them on my disk! [...]

Phil 29.07.10 / 9pm

Adobe seems to think doing this is a no-no…
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/676056?tstart=-1

I better not risk it though I have almost 3 gigs in nonsense on my drive.

AdamJury 19.09.10 / 12pm

Hey Phil,

My experience with CS4 has included deleting the PatchFiles directory and then applying more patches on top of it without incident.

Elliott 13.10.10 / 10am

Great find. As far as I can tell it still works with CS5.

One thing that is different with on my computer, however, is that right now there is a folder named “Adobe” along side my CS5 folders (I installed Ps and Ai into my Applications folder). Inside of “Adobe” sits “Adobe Help.app” and a folder called “AdobePatchFiles”.

Within “AdobePatchFiles” are several folders ranging from a couple Mb to one that is >100Mb. I am assuming that this is where the actual patches are stored, the largest being the first update, and is not a temporary folder like the one found here.

Has anyone else seen this with CS5 and can confirm my suspicions?

AdamJury 13.10.10 / 11am

Elliot — Your info is, as far as I know, correct. I just started experimenting with that last week. I’ve deleted that folder on my laptop install of CS5, and kept it on my desktop.

Before even trying this, I’ve had problems with the CS5 updater for months, on both computers — Adobe Device Central and Illustrator updates both fail with these messages:

Adobe Device Central CS5.0.1
Installation failed

Adobe Illustrator CS5 15.0.1 Update
Installation failed

Other updates install just fine.

The installer and updater is much nicer in CS5, though!

Reclaim Disk Space After Creative Suite 4 Updates – Remove AdobePatchFiles

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