Cleaning the public folder

We have an older Nexus 2 repository that we have been running for years for some local project libraries. I am trying to clean it up to recover disk space. I have set up jobs to clean up our hosted and proxy repositories. I was browsing the disk drive and noticed that the public folder had a lot of files still in it. Does it make a copy of my hosted repository files? Do I need to set up a different type of job to clean this out? It seems to have entries for some tests we did years ago that shouldn’t exist anymore.