Reclaim Docker WSL Disk Space

I ran out of system SSD disk space on my Win10 PC at home and tracked a large share of the usage to a vhdx virtual disk image file in a Docker Desktop folder. Below is the summary of what I found.

Docker Desktop for Windows uses WSL to manage all your images and container files and keeps them in a private virtual hard drive (VHDX) called ext4.vhdx.

It’s usually in C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Local\Docker\wsl\data and you can often reclaim some of the space if you’ve cleaned up (pruned your images, etc) with Optimize-Vhd under an administrator PowerShell shell/prompt.