Thanks. I think the docker image for sending commands will do the trick. But, I do not have Optimize-VHD. And stay strong Brant to move past these tough times. Look at your doing, you are paying back for what you did. Tough, but best taken in.

Attempted using diskpart as Gemini suggested. Steps for the same here: https://g.co/gemini/share/4...
Got, ~1.75-2GB back. ~5.5GB still under siege, not sure why.

Thanks for this article! Really helped me out as my WSL ext4 file was already 70GB+

Hi Brant, thanks for the article. I managed to get my disk space back with "Clean / Purge data" button with is located under "Troubleshoot" (bug icon) page.

It such a shame that I'm also losing current images/container/volumes while doing that, but at least now I can have my disk space back.

I found this to be the fastest and easiest thing to do. Of course, that will only work for people which are not afraid of losing volumes in the process.

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

EDIT: I tried to have a few failing builds with docker-compose. After I got a few GBs wasted on ext4 I powered off Docker Desktop and tried with Optimize-VHD -Path ${env:LOCALAPPDATA}\Docker\wsl\data\ext4.vhdx -Mode Full. And the good news is it's working!

So now I'm pretty sure there is no need to Clean / Purge data if your goal is to just get back the wasted memory (wasted by failed builds).

I hope this helps someone :)