How Sparewise decides what is safe to clear
Short answer: not by file type or by guessing. Sparewise only offers what comes back by itself, and tells you why for each one. Everything else is shown to you, never removed.
What it offers to clear
- Caches at known locations: npm, pnpm, Yarn, pip, uv, NuGet, Gradle, Maven, Cargo, Go, browser and editor caches, Windows temporary files and more.
- Each one says in plain words why it is safe: the program that made it rebuilds or downloads it again when needed.
- Build folders inside your projects (node_modules, virtual environments, target, bin and obj) are offered only when they really are build output, never when they hold files you committed to git.
- No AI decides this. An assistant you connect can suggest and plan, but it can never make something count as safe.
What it never removes
See every folder it knows, with its verdict →
- AI models (Ollama, LM Studio, Hugging Face): slow to download again. It reports size, last use, shared layers and old revisions, and gives you the command to remove one.
- Docker volumes, WSL distributions, virtual machines: they can hold your data. It shows the size and the right tool's command.
- Your own files: large videos, duplicates and old downloads are listed so you can decide. Sparewise does not remove them.
- Any folder you add to the exclusions in Settings.
Checks before every change
- The plan is shown to you first, with sizes. Nothing changes until you confirm (or, for an AI assistant, unless your own limits allow it).
- If anything changed since you looked, that item is left alone.
- Files a program has open are left where they are, and it tells you, so you can close the program and try again.
- Everything goes to the Recycle Bin or is set aside. If the Recycle Bin is turned off or too small for an item, Sparewise refuses rather than deleting.
- Afterwards it measures how much space was really freed.
AI assistants
Over MCP an assistant gets the same rules plus your own limits: a size cap, which kinds of change it may make alone, and folders it must never touch. It can never delete permanently, and every change it makes is recorded with its name and reason and can be undone.