Excessive user data storage (10 GB) - how to clean?

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1

I’m running F-Droid version 1.20.0 on GrapheneOS and am having a storage issue. I noticed today that F-Droid is consuming over 15 GB of storage space (10.40 GB user data, ~5 GB cache). I’m trying to free up some space. I think we can all agree that this is excessive.

I have the following repos:

  1. F-Droid
  2. Briar Project
  3. Session
  4. Guardian Project

Steps I’ve taken:

  1. Clear cache (still have 10.40 GB user data)
  2. Settings → Other → Keep cached apps: Reduced to 1 hour
  3. Disabled battery saver
  4. Confirmed there are no battery restrictions specific to F-Droid
  5. Gave the app 2 hours to clear up unnecessary data. It hasn’t done anything.
  6. Gave the app “Files” permission (is this necessary?)
  7. Signed out and back in

I would very much like for F-Droid to not consume 10.5 GB of my storage. I’m not sure what else to try. I’m aware that I can manually clear all of the user data, but I would prefer not to have to do that because I don’t want to reset the settings and repos (unless that is my only option).

Can anyone help?

2

Sounds like you’re running it in a secondary/work profile?

This bug is more likely to happen then since it won’t run the timer when the profile isn’t active afaik.

Really F-Droid should just have a clear button, this bug is like a decade old now.

1 Like
3

Yes exactly. I have a separate user profile for installing app updates. The reason for this is for efficiency and security. All other user profiles have no app install privileges and each profile has different apps. The profile in question updates all the apps that the other profiles have.

I get that this setup may have contributed to the problem. However, there are definitely issues here. I left this profile signed in for over two hours and despite F-Droid being configured to clean out old data after 1 hour, 10.40 GB of user data remains.

4

We don’t have a better fix now other than: backup the repo urls, clean app data, readd repos. :frowning:

5

I’ve tried the following and it partially works.

  1. Disabled battery optimizations.
  2. Cleared all data (including user data).
  3. Set no autoupdates, nor searching for updates.
  4. Didn’t add any other repo
  5. Also set cache for 1 hour only.
  6. App permissions are only Location and Camera (for nearby sharing), no Files permission needed apparently

After that, app user data was about 70 MB, what’s still somewhat big, but much less than before (500 MB). I wonder if that corresponds to the index, as the only thing I did was opening F-Droid so it updated repositories. :thinking: (Is the index also saved as user data?) Cache was only 0,7 MB.

I did a little browsing and the next I tried was updating only one app (12 MB) and confirmed that both user data and cache have increased by roughly the same amount, i.e. user data 92 MB and cache 19 MB.

After waiting for about two hours, I checked again and user data and cache were back at previous values. There are still some strange numbers, especially app size varying, which is confusing.

To sumarize, this is my scenario in numbers, in case it helps:

						APP			USER DATA	CACHE		TOTAL
Before cleaning			39.34		502			238			779
After initial cleaning	39.34		68.81		0.696		109
After a little browsing	32.03		81.23		6.49		120
Next day (nothing done)	32.03		81.22		6.5			120
Updating an app (12 MB)	32.03		93.22		19.97		145
After 2 hours			38.04		68.19		6.82		113

Updating app (7.59 MB)	38.04		75.77		15.2		129
Updating app (24.23 MB)	38.04		100			39.46		178
Updating app (1.67 MB)	38.04		102			41.14		238
Updating app (28.67 MB)	38.04		130			70.43		239
After 5 hours			39.54		93.13		8.18		141

I forgot to mention that I’m not using other Android profiles.