Why does my Unity project contain tens of thousands of files when the actual game assets is far less?

My game has maybe 50 textures and 30 prefabs, and that’s about it, but the actual Unity file is over a gigabyte in size and contains tens of thousands of files, so when I try to copy the project as a backup it takes absolutely ages.

Why does a very simple Unity project have tends of thousands or random files that seem to be in there basically by default?

Edit: Part of answering my own question is that I’m using Standard Assets and Oculus Controller stuff–although the entire Assets folder for the project is still on a couple hundred MB–so will Unity at least ignore any of that stuff I don’t use when it builds the game for other people to actually play? Also, is there a way to easily be able to delete any stuff myself now that isn’t being used from those things (as in an easy way to know what can be deleted that won’t break the stuff I am using)?

Greetings,
Good to hear that you’re well on the journey to completing your project!

Yes, Unity will cut out anything residing in the project which it isn’t going to need for your game/app, when it gets built.
(Example: My Noah’s Veggie Run project is ~ 1GB, but shrinks down to 54 MB when built for Android. )
There are several tools on the Unity Assetstore to scan your project, and will point out to you which assets are not needed at all. Some of these might be: Asset Hunter 2, or This Project on GitHub.
Good luck and…
Keep on Creating!

Justin of JustinTime.Studio

Not to resurrect, but this came up for me as well, and this is very high on google. For those who still land here…

When you backup, just exclude *.bin there are 100,000+ shader variants which Unity can build if you need to do a restore.