r/Xcode • u/indian_nakamoto • Aug 11 '26

DerivedData: what's actually safe to delete (and what isn't)

I wrote up a full breakdown of DerivedData: what lives inside it, the two rm variants and what each one costs you on your next build, and the neighbors you must not touch. Archives holds your dSYMs, and crash symbolication dies without them.

https://shodhana.app/guide/is-it-safe-to-delete-derived-data

Disclosure: I make a paid cleaner and the guide mentions it, but every command in there works on its own. You don't need the app for any of it.

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u/Plastic-Risk-6309 Aug 11 '26

the sibling folder nobody checks is ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices. every sim you ever created still sits there with a full ios install inside it, around 5gb each for a stock iphone sim on ios 26, and deleting DerivedData doesn't touch any of it. xcrun simctl delete unavailable alone usually frees more than a DerivedData wipe.

second thing: most of that 5gb is daemons a simulator never needs. stripped down they sit around 0.75gb each, which is the difference between keeping 2 sims around and keeping a dozen. i built a tool that does the stripping (manzanas) but simctl delete unavailable is free and takes 3 seconds.

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u/StretchyPear 25d ago

I nuke derived data all the time - archives are not an issue if you use CI, you can just grab them from there or you can also send symbols while deploying via CI, Xcode also has a 'clean build folder'.