Blender Cleanup: Temp Renders, Cache and Addon Leftovers

The junk Blender leaves behind

Every save writes backups: .blend1, .blend2 and up, sitting next to the .blend file, one per kept version, forever. Renders that crashed or went to the default output path pile up in the per-session temp folder Blender creates under %TEMP%\blender_. Physics bakes — smoke, cloth, fluid — land in a blendcache folder next to the project, and those are routinely gigabytes per scene. None of it is ever cleaned automatically; Blender quietly assumes your disk is infinite.

Then there is the user profile: %APPDATA%\Blender Foundation\Blender\ gets a new folder per major version, so a machine that lived through 2.9 → 3.3 → 4.x carries three full profiles with scripts, addons, matcaps and preferences. Since Blender 4.2 the extensions system adds its own directories under the version's extensions folder. Old profiles stay behind after an upgrade, untouched and unneeded — Blender never migrates or removes them.

What is safe to delete

The backups are the easy win. Blender's "Save Versions" preference keeps one or more .blendN files per project, and a file saved two hundred times carries a train of ghosts behind it; keep the newest .blend1 for a week if you are cautious, delete the rest. The temp folders from dead sessions die without consequences — they existed only for the session that created them and will be rebuilt on the next launch.

The two things that are not junk: blendcache and the current version's profile. Deleting a bake cache means every future render re-runs the simulation first — on a fluid sim that can be hours — and the current profile holds your keymaps, addons and preferences. If disk pressure is urgent, a cleanup pass with Kleaner PRO sweeps the temp and old-profile categories automatically, but bake caches deserve a human decision per project.

• .blend1/.blend2 backups — copies of old saves; keep the most recent one per project, delete the rest
• Temp renders and crash dumps — %TEMP%\blender_ folders from dead sessions, pure junk
• Old version profiles — %APPDATA%\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.x once you live happily in 4.x
• blendcache folders — only after the project ships; deleting them means re-baking before any re-render
• Uninstalled addon leftovers — removed addons leave scripts behind in the profile's addons folder
• Output folder overshoot — "final_final_v3" experiments older than the cut you actually shipped

Habits that stop the pile-up

Lower "Save Versions" to 1 in Preferences → Save & Load if a single backup is enough — it caps the ghost count going forward. Point render output at a dedicated folder per project instead of the default, and clear it when the project ships. After every version upgrade, check the Blender Foundation folder: the old profile is a few hundred megabytes nobody will ever open again. Ten minutes twice a year keeps Blender's footprint boring, which is the correct state for a working machine.

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