Resolve mysteriously eating up gigabytes of drive space

Hi all... I recently was doing a "photo dump" project in Resolve, which means I just take hundreds of photos I took on vacation and set them all to display for 8 frames each and render a video of them all set to music. I made 2 of these videos using roughly 1,000 photos.

I noticed after I rendered the first video that I lost about 6gb of space on my hard drive, despite the final video only being about 200mb. The second video was only 160mb, but I noticed again that I lost another 6gb of hard drive space. What gives? (and yes the photos were already on my drive before i started the project, they've been sitting there for 6+ months)

I already tried looking in the folder containing the project files, the install directory, and C:\ProgramData (on windows), but I none of these seem to account for the missing space. I don't know what's going on, but I have nothing going on in the background, and it is definitely Resolve doing something.

While I was rendering the videos, I kept getting messages that my "GPU memory is full". So I figured that Resolve might be burning optimized media to disk somewhere, so I looked in my Cached Clips folder, but there was only 100mb worth of files there.

I have no idea why I lost 6gb of space with each render and am scared to continue using Resolve until I figure out why. Does anyone know what is going on here? Thank you so much!

You can use software like WinDirStat to find out what is eating the disk space.
If it's Resolve, then it might be Optimized media or some form of cache.
Check the Project Settings in what format you are rendering your cache/optimized media, probably uncompressed 10 bit (which is the default) is overkill for your task.

Open your most recent projects, click on the Playback menu, and click on "Delete Render Cache"- all. That should free up the space.

Thanks everyone. I think I found the issue late last night. I noticed that my pagefile.sys file had swollen by several gigabytes the night of the render (up to a total of 20gb), so I assume now that Davinci was dumping overflow from the GPU memory into pagefile.sys. I will do some tests in the next few days to make sure this is what is happening.

For what it's worth, I did delete Render Cache and Optimized Media under the Playback menu, but I only gained negligible space from that.

Hey @jer2112, did you find something further on this? I lost around 15 GBs on a single project.

6 GB is nothing in this line of work. If you're genuinely worried about that, you need significantly more storage. Solve that.

6 GB is nothing in this line of work. If you're genuinely worried about that, you need significantly more storage. Solve that.

I lose 100gb to 200gb only to cache file everytime I open davinci resolve, even if I just let it stay opened without editing anything further.

it's getting tiring to keep deleting the cache file every hour when I am editing the video. This problem only appears recently though.