Docker commit fills up hard drive; cannot be cleaned up

Docker Desktop for Windows
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When I run “docker commit …”, it fills up my hard drive with no way to clear it out. When I then try to delete the container I tried to commit, it cannot be done because my hard drive is full.

I’m somewhat shocked that this user journey is even possible. There should be a command to list and remove whatever artifacts are created as part of a “commit”. As in, my computer is seriously impacted by this and there seems to be no way to undo it.

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Ok, I was able to delete the container after restarting my computer (I just lost all the work I did this weekend), but it didn’t reclaim the hard drive space. To be clear, I had 70 GB of free hard drive space that is now being held hostage by Docker.

I followed these instructions which reduced it by about 25 GB, but that’s a far cry from the 70 GB I had moments before the “commit” command.

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you can try docker system prune to clear up the hard drive

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Ok, it looks like this can be mitigated by moving the file to a new drive. I followed most of the instructions below by stopping WSL, making a backup of the WSL into an new directory, and re-registering the Docker WSL entry using that backup.

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Thanks for the idea. I avoided it because the first message says it will delete all stopped Containers, but I really, really didn’t want to accidentally delete some of my containers. I think I could start the Containers I didn’t want to use and add tags and then a filter in the command to not clean up objects with those tags. But, it was too scary at the time.

Now that I have some free space by moving everything to a drive with much more free space, I might try it tomorrow after work.

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