Reclaim Diskspace Vault Cache

When downloading and adding content from the Unreal Engine Marketplace to your project, they are first stored in a local cache. This allows you to re-add the same content examples to multiple projects without re-downloading the content.

While this is great for reducing the amount of bandwidth and the time needed to re-add the content to new projects, it comes at a cost. That cost is storage space on your hard drive.

To see how much storage space is being used for the content you have already downloaded, proceed to the Unreal Engine → Library tab, and scroll down until your Vault comes into view. Next to the Filter By section, you’ll see a cloud with a down arrow and a numeric value.

In the image above, 205.3GB of cache is being stored on the hard drive. To put this into perspective, this is taking up roughly 20% of a 1TB hard drive.

Here is an example on how much space certain content packs take —

Clearing the cache

There are two methods to find and clear the cached content packs —

Method 1 - The Vault Cache Directory

All of the cached content packs can be found in the Epic Games Launcher Vault Cache directory. By default, this can be found here —

C:\ProgramData\Epic\EpicGamesLauncher\VaultCache

To clear the cache, simply select each of the folders in the VaultCache directory and delete them.

Method 2 - Manually find via the Epic Games Launcher

As of writing, there is no filter to sort by which vault items are being cached. Therefore, this method requires you to manually hunt through the Vault section of the Epic Games Launcher.

The cached content packs will display an active drop down button along with displaying the cached size.

To clear the cache, click on the active dropdown button and select the Remove Local Content option.

Conclusion

Developing projects with Unreal Engine fills up your hard drive over time. Periodically clearing the Epic Games Launcher’s Vault Cache helps reclaim the lost disk space.