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can we reduce disk usage?

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  • Last reply by salphakio

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Firefox uses about half a gig on my disk, that's: '~/.mozilla' and '~/.cache/mozilla' can that be reduced? Either some setting that limits disk use or even a manual deletion of ancient stuff?

Firefox uses about half a gig on my disk, that's: '~/.mozilla' and '~/.cache/mozilla' can that be reduced? Either some setting that limits disk use or even a manual deletion of ancient stuff?

All Replies (11)

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Go to menu ≡ -> Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Cookies and Site Data. There should be a button to clear unneeded data.

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All that cache stuff only amounts to about 100MB. No matter how much I delete in there,

~/.mozilla/firefox is still 486Mb.

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Just curious... What model hard drive to you have?

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What folders and files is taken up most of that amount of space as 500kB shouldn't be that much? Did you clear the disk cache ?

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> Just curious... What model hard drive to you have?

Sheesh, several. A half a dozen 80GB, one 1TB, and a 240G SSD, Why do you ask? It's not that I'm running out of room it's that I don't like bloat as a matter of principle.

> What folders and files is taken up most of that amount of space as 500kB shouldn't be that much?

That's 500MB not KB.

> Did you clear the disk cache ?

Yeah, but as I said, cache is the least of it. Most of it is in '~/.mozilla/firefox/(profile)

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Sorry, KB is a typo, I meant MB of course.

Half a Gigabyte isn't that much for a browser as storage (indexedDB) in the ~/.mozilla location and disk cache in the secondary location can accumulate quite some data overtime and some databases have (fixed) sizes in the tens of MB that add up to the total.

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I suppose it's par for the course. Dunno, I just have a frugal nature, I remember 10MB HDDs, I don't like junk laying around. I'd like some information on purging stuff that really isn't doing anything but maybe that's not going to happen. Too bad there wasn't some way of auto purging stuff that hasn't been accessed for, say, two years. Every visit I've ever made to YouTube seems to have left something on the drive. Is there a limit, or will FF one day fill up my 1TB disk? You can put a limit on the size of the cache, but not on the other data, it seems.

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For places.sqlite you can use "Verify Integrity" in about:support to vacuum this file and reduce its size (check the stats: View Statistics), assuming you first remove old, no longer needed, history. For other SQLite databases the only way is to delete them and start with a fresh file. Large JSON files are usually compressed (lz4 in the file extension) and do not have the empty space that you get with SQLite.

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Is there some doc that explains the file system? Dunno, maybe I could do some judicious pruning. Or maybe FF won't like that?

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Hey, here's an idea: You know how one can save one's profile and import it? Supposing I imported to 'myself' but via another profile -- but all I want to save is bookmarks, passwords, log in information, preferences and such. All the useful stuff is probably only a few MB, the rest seems like junk.

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Firefox is using about half a gig of disk space in ~/.mozilla and ~/.cache/mozilla. Can this be reduced? Are there settings to limit disk use or a way to manually delete old files.

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