In the good practice of IntelliJ application, PyCharm creates its own cache directory in your home. Mind you this can get really big (300Mb+) and if you sync your home with a networked drive, you'll get penalised (time-wise).

Following this discovery (my login/logout time is up to 30mins because of this and other files), I looked for a way to put this content in a place which is not backed up. The generic solution is presented here.

My PyCharm-specific solution is:

  1. Locate the place where you've installed you AS (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\JetBrains\PyCharm 3.1.3)

  2. Go to the bin directory and edit idea.properties file

  3. Search for idea.config.path and idea.system.path and edit those. I ended up having something like:

    #---------------------------------------------------------------------
#
idea.config.path=${user.home}/no-backup/.PyCharm31/config

idea.system.path=${user.home}/no-backup/.PyCharm31/system
#
#---------------------------------------------------------------------

    Make sure to uncomment the lines, otherwise you will end up with AS recreating the directory in your home.

  4. I kept ${user.home} as base directory, because PyCharm will create (or update) the directory for each user!

HTH,