Shrinking and Compacting WSL Storage

If you’ve been using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for a while, you might notice something annoying: "your storage keeps disappearing".

Day by day, the WSL virtual disk (ext4.vhdx) grows bigger, even if you’ve deleted files inside Linux. The problem is that WSL doesn’t automatically shrink the disk, so your Windows storage slowly gets eaten up 😵‍💫.

But, you can shrink and compact the WSL virtual disk manually, and It's pretty easy.

This guide works for WSL2

1. Open your PowerShell

Open the powershell in your windows, recommended if you run as administrator.

3. Run DiskPart

If the command failed try to manually enable the Hyper-V

powershell
diskpart

after run that, you will see something like this in the terminal (or it maybe will open the new window of the terminal)

powershell
1Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.26100.1150
2
3Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
4On computer: ARDHPTR21
5
6DISKPART>

4. Select the WSL Virtual Disk

Usually the Virtual Disk is named as ext4.vdisk. The location if this file is depends in where you install the WSL, but usually if you not setting up anything it will located under %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\, and there is will be listed the WSL Distro that you installed, ex: C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Local\Packages\CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu_79rhkp1fndgsc\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

Then you can run this command inside the diskpart

powershell
DISKPART> select vdisk file="C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Local\Packages\...\LocalState\ext4.vhdx"

5. Attach the disk to readonly

powershell
DISKPART> attach vdisk readonly

6. Start shrinking

powershell
DISKPART> compact vdisk

7. Finalize

Actually after you running the compact process the size of your virtual disk should be more smaller now, but last don't forget to detach and exit from the diskpart mode.

powershell
DISKPART: detach vdisk
DISPART: exit

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And... you're done🔥