To enable binary logging open the MySql configuration file my.cnf /my.ini and add the following line to the end of [mysqld] section and restart the server:

log_bin=base_name

Lets say base_name is given as ‘mysql-bin’.

This will write the binary log files in the MySql data directory. Mysql appends a numeric extension to the binary log basename to generate binary log file names. The number increases each time the server creates a new log file, thus creating an ordered series of files.

My C:\ drive partion space was almost full, so I tried to analyse junk data on my machine to free some space. I noticed that MySql ‘data’ folder was using around 16GB. Further looking into the data folder I noticed that many mysql binary log files had been created and they were occupying GBs of the space.

After cleaning the log file the ‘data’ folder size reduced to ~6GB.