Home Assistant Green: Storage permanently ~99% full – no backups possible, cause not identifiable

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi everyone,

I really need some help and I’m honestly stuck at this point.

I’m running Home Assistant Green (Home Assistant OS, no custom Docker/VM setup) and recently ran into a serious storage issue that I cannot explain or fix.

Problem description

  • Total storage: ~28 GB
  • Used: ~26.6 GB (99%)
  • Free: < 200 MB
  • Backups fail due to insufficient disk space
  • Updates are also problematic

I do not have Linux expertise and use Home Assistant purely as an end user.

What I already checked / tried

  • df -h shows ~99% usage everywhere
  • du -h does not reveal any large directory explaining the usage→ e.g. /homeassistant shows ~21.9 GB, but all subfolders are tiny
  • Only very few add-ons installed:
    • Advanced SSH & Web Terminal
    • File Editor
  • No Grafana, no InfluxDB, no VS Code add-on
  • Docker cleanup:

“docker system prune
Total reclaimed space: 0B”

  • Multiple host reboots
  • Logs are moderate in size (~180 MB)
  • Backups:
    • One automatic backup (~42 MB)
    • Creating new backups fails due to low disk space

Result: Storage remains full no matter what I do.

System information (shortened)

  • Home Assistant OS: 15.2
  • Core: 2025.7.2
  • Device: Home Assistant Green
  • Architecture: aarch64
  • Installation type: Home Assistant OS
  • Recorder:
    • SQLite
    • DB size ~46 MB

Terminal output

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
/dev/mmcblk0p8 28G 26.6G 179M 99%

du -h -d 1 /homeassistant
4.0K .cloud
4.0K deps
4.0K tts
60.0K blueprints
1.2M www
2.8M .storage
4.3M image
53.4M custom_components
21.9G /homeassistant

I cannot understand where those 21–22 GB are actually coming from .

Current situation

  • I cannot create backups
  • I cannot free up disk space
  • I don’t know whether this is a known HA OS / Docker overlay / eMMC issue
  • I tried to troubleshoot with ChatGPT, but unfortunately did not reach a working solution

My questions

  1. Is this a known issue on Home Assistant Green ?
  2. Is there any safe way to identify what is consuming this space?
  3. Is there any supported cleanup method, or is this considered an OS-level problem?
  4. What would be the recommended next step, especially given that backups are no longer possible?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hello Profile - dfens - Home Assistant Community,

Your system stores the entire contents of your backup in temporary files before it pushes them off to the remote storage location(s). Therefore if your drive is more that 50% full, you run the risk of the backup failing due to out of space condition.

  • Restarting Home Assistant will clear data from tmp which is the temporary file storage area. Sometimes that gets people over the hump.
  • How many back-ups are you storing on the main drive?
  • Disk space being eaten up - #9 by mjvanderveen.
3

Have you tried

  • docker system prune --all
  • docker image prune
  • docker image prune -all

But before you continue, you should try to dig deeper into your directories. What is your biggest entry of ls -alS /homeassistant. Is there any big chunk of file(s)?

4

same here (issues with backup not working like it supposed to do)

tried df -h whole system shows 84% used of 116GB
du- -h just 23GB of data accounted for

so where is the missing 50GB?

5

What’s your output of du -ah /homeassistant | sort -h. This will show you the used space including files (not only directories) and will sort it from small to big

6

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the late reply! (Christmas)

For now, here’s my output:

➜ ~ ls -alS /homeassistant
total 62096
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 54517760 Dec 28 03:11 home-assistant_v2.db
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 4272472 Dec 28 03:18 home-assistant_v2.db-wal
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 4124152 Dec 28 03:18 zigbee.db-wal
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 204800 Dec 28 03:16 zigbee.db
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 188346 Dec 26 19:46 home-assistant.log.old
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 66284 Dec 27 15:39 home-assistant.log.1
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 32768 Dec 28 03:18 home-assistant_v2.db-shm
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 32768 Dec 28 03:18 zigbee.db-shm
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 24844 Dec 28 03:18 home-assistant.log
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 16786 Dec 27 09:27 automations.yaml
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Dec 27 16:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Dec 27 16:15 …
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 18 11:18 .cloud
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Dec 28 03:18 .storage
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jul 30 08:50 blueprints
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 11 13:47 custom_components
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 18 11:18 deps
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Jul 29 08:11 image
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 18 11:18 tts
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul 21 10:01 www
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2983 Jul 25 11:35 scripts.yaml
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2471 Jul 31 07:22 configuration.yaml
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 1651 Aug 1 22:16 scenes.yaml
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 161 Jul 18 11:18 secrets.yaml
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 84 Dec 26 20:05 .ha_run.lock
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 8 Dec 26 20:15 .HA_VERSION
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 26 20:05 home-assistant.log.fault

Even after a restart, 95% was still in use.

In the meantime, I expanded the storage using a USB stick and was at least able to run a backup.

Regarding the other questions:

When I run -ah /homeassistant I get output saying that -ah doesn’t work at all — that command doesn’t exist.

Thanks again for your help

Greetings
dfens

7

Then you typed it wrong.

du -ah /homeassistant | sort -h

Here’s my most used folders:

109.1M  /homeassistant/www/community/advanced-camera-card
161.2M  /homeassistant/www/community
163.3M  /homeassistant/www
342.1M  /homeassistant/home-assistant_v2.db
750.1M  /homeassistant

(The 750MB /homeassisant is the sum total of the lines, subfolders, above it.)

You can delete home-assistant_v2.db and free up a lot of space, but your history will disappear.

8

Wow, that was the thing that helped, thanks!

I deleted the old v2.db and capped the logs so that it wont get that big again. It had more than 5 gb of, for me unnecessary, data.

Thanks a lot and have a happy new year :slight_smile:

9

This might also be helpful to find used space.

10

Install Samba Share add-on and you can see the Home Assistant folders in Windows Explorer.

11

This solved my issue:

Found a broken backup of a database hidding on a non-standard accesible location.