Used Space approaching 100%

Installation
1

Hi All,

I have a bit of an issue, I am running HA on a RPI 4b with a 32Gb MicroSD card. The storage is approaching 100%, currently 97.2%:
image

I have 2 issues.

  1. I don’t know what is taking up so much space, how can i find out?
    The System information says: “Estimated database size (MiB) 436.76 MiB”
    I have Influx DB set-up for longer term data storage, could this be taking up so much space?
  2. With so little space available at the moment, I can’t install a Terminal Add-on to investigate further, how can I clear some space or move data to an external disk temporarily?

Thanks for the help in advance

2

Do you have lots of backups on the SD card?

If so, move them off the card automatically using one of the methods listed in option 5 here: https://www.home-assistant.io/common-tasks/os#copying-your-backups-to-another-location

Also use includes/excludes to only store data in influxdb that you are interested in long term.

3

Yes, very much so.

Clear some space (good shout Tom to check for old backups), or worst case, get another uSD card, install Rasbpian and use that as a base to recover/ export/ delete data from the original install.

HA manages data summarisation on the supported SQLite database engine, but less so on others:

N.B. InfluxDB runs in parallel with a main DB engine for HA, so you may well have TWO copies of historical sensor data (SQLite + InfluxDB, both with different data summarisation).

InfluxDB is not something I’ve ever been a DBA for so…

4

I have deleted them all. Could they be left lingering?

5

Ok so I had a look, the recorder is definitely only recording 7 days worth of data. There are no back-ups on the SD card, I have 2 back-ups on a NAS and when I made that change I deleted the old back-ups on the SD card, could they have lingered? Is there a way to find out?

Influx is only reporting to be about 500MB worth of data which feels about right.

I have just done another back-up onto the NAS, the back-up size is 900Mb, ~700 of which is the influxdb.tar.gz, which again is close enough with what Influx reports to be the size of the DB, assuming that includes the influx configs and add-on files. The homeassistant.tar.gz is 200Mb.

Thoughts? Could I just wipe the SD card completely and install HA fresh and then restore this new back-up?

Is there another way of finding what is filling up the storage?

6

Doubt it, that’s not how filesystems work, but as you’ve not mentioned how you deleted them… :man_shrugging:

Start searching for basic Linux command line sysadmin tutorials.

Here’s two to start looking:

$ df -h      # results are complicated by the container mounting many things
$ du -h /homeassistant
  • HA backup files are just nested tar archives, so it’s simple (with Linux tools) to unpack, and see the individual parts and their backup sizes (tar tvf backup.tar).
  • Install something like the SQLite Web interface and explore your database tables.
  • Get another uSD card, install Rasbpian and use that as a base to recover/ export/ delete data from the original install.

Possible, but not a good idea.
Get ANOTHER 32Gb U0 uSD card and start from a fresh installand restore - that way you have a way back (and remove the chance of a hardware failure / need to FSTRIM).

1 Like
7

Fixed / Update:
I downloaded a back-up and loaded it on another SD card. Total storage used was only 10.9GB, so clearly something up from a reporting point of view.
I then deleted Influx DB and its entire database and that dropped the storage down to 9GB, so as I suspected Influx was not to blame, although I will optimise the data I am storing soon.

I found this article: Disk space being eaten up - #9 by mjvanderveen

Although my scenario is not exactly the same, I suspect the cause is the same. I have not tried to clear it with this method yet, but I installed a fresh version of HAOS on the SD card in question + loaded the back-up onto it. Bingo, the complete used space is now 10.9GB.

All back to normal, thanks for everyone’s suggestions.