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Christopher Goossens
Christopher Goossens
Participant
December 29, 2025

After Effect Still caching on internal drive even with external drive setup by Enable disk cache

  • December 29, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 250 views

Hello everyone,

First of all, I wish you all a very happy holiday season and all the best for the coming year.

To avoid filling up the hard drive of my MacBook Pro M4 16 GB - 512 GB - Tahoe 26.1, I usually use an external hard drive (a 1TB Samsung T7) for After Effects' cache.

Since a recent update, I've noticed that despite this, After Effects is still creating gigabytes of cache files in the folder: /Users/username/Library/Caches.

This is in addition to the cache on the external drive.

I regularly have to disconnect the external hard drive and restart After Effects so that it connects to the default folder /Users/username/Library/Caches. This allows me to clear the cache in this folder through the user interface.

Is there a solution to prevent After Effects from adding cache files to the computer's hard drive when I use an external hard drive designed for this purpose?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Enable-disk-cache.pngSetup.png

 

2 replies

Christopher Goossens
Christopher GoossensAuthor
Participant
December 29, 2025

Hello @OliviaHazel 

Thank you for your response.
Where can I set the max internal cache limit?
I don't want to reduce the Maximum Disk Cache size, since it allows me to preview fluidly animation.

Also I would like to insist and say that previously I didn't have this problem, when my T7 was connected and setup as the cache folder, the ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects was never full.

Now it fills (today it was 45Gb) in parallel with the T7.

nishu_kush
nishu_kush
Legend
December 29, 2025

That's not ideal.

Can you try running After Effects in Safe Mode and see if the issue persists? You'll need to change the cache location again when you launch in Safe Mode.

Let us know.


Thanks,
Nishu

O
OliviaHazel
Participating Frequently
December 29, 2025

What you can do

  • Move everything possible
    Preferences → Media & Disk Cache
    Set Disk Cache, Media Cache, and Media Cache Database to your T7.

  • Limit internal cache size
    Set max cache on the internal drive to 5–10 GB so it doesn’t grow out of control.

  • Clear safely when needed (AE closed):

     
    ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects

Why it happens

AE still keeps:

  • temp files

  • startup data

  • GPU / plugin cache

Those always hit /Library/Caches, no way around it right now.

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