Clean .patch_storage

Found below procedure in some blog. Thanks to the post:

I got an alert from Enterprise Manager that my C: drive on one of my database servers was running short on space. The disk device is 20GB is size and had less than 1GB free. I removed old log files, but this still did not free up enough space. In looking around, I saw that my 11gR2 ORACLE_HOME directory was over 7GB in size. More investigation revealed that the %ORACLE_HOME%\.patch_storage directory was consuming over half of that! You can’t just go and delete this folder as it will stop your ability to apply future patches.

I discovered Metalink Note 550522.1 which gave me a nice feature of OPatch to clean up some of this space.  You can see this feature below:

C:\>%ORACLE_HOME%\OPatch\opatch util cleanup

Invoking OPatch 11.2.0.1.1

Oracle Interim Patch Installer version 11.2.0.1.1

Copyright (c) 2009, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

UTIL session

Oracle Home       : c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2

Central Inventory : C:\Program Files\Oracle\Inventory

from           : n/a

OPatch version    : 11.2.0.1.1

OUI version       : 11.2.0.2.0

OUI location      : c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2\oui

Log file location : c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2\cfgtoollogs\opatch\opatch2013-03-

21_13-02-46PM.log

Patch history file: c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2\cfgtoollogs\opatch\opatch_history

.txt

Invoking utility “cleanup”

OPatch will clean up ‘restore.sh,make.txt’ files and ‘rac,scratch,backup’ direct

ories.

You will be still able to rollback patches after this cleanup.

Do you want to proceed? [y|n]

y

User Responded with: Y

Size of directory “c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2\.patch_storage” before cleanup is

3921310486 bytes.

Size of directory “c:\oracle\product\11.2.0.2\.patch_storage” after cleanup is 2

233118071 bytes.

UtilSession: Backup area for restore has been cleaned up. For a complete list of

files/directories

deleted, Please refer log file.

OPatch succeeded.

Running this cleaned up about 1.4GB of space.