VM space increasing after each update - How to reduce it

Hello to all,

I know that many of you will not consider the following an issue but it’s something that bothers me so i figured i would ask. In general, i am a person that i like to keep my drives very tidy regardless the device and the same applies to Home Assistant. I run home assistant from November 2020 in a virtual machine. Around December 2021 my Virtual machines backups were more than 8GB and the HA instance was unstable. It was then, that i decided to delete my VM and start from scratch.

With a clean install and all devices / addons / community addons / automations / scenes etc my starting VM back-up file was about 3.5GB. Now i see this increasing again as newer versions of HA come up.

In general, i keep back-ups regularly and this is what i see:

As displayed in the picture, the size of the backup is increasing version to version. I started then looking at the forums and everybody speaks about the db size. Well, my db size is just a few mb at it’s worst because i have set up an automation to purge the recorder and re-pack the database every night. In the same automation i am also clearing the log so my db is kept very small.

From December 2021 until today, i haven’t added any new device in my home so i don’t have more entities than i used to, and i haven’t added new addons. In fact i have very little. Please see below:

and this is my Community addons:


Just to show you the db size please check the below screenshot:

I don’t have any media uploaded to Home Assistant and i cannot really find where the size increase is coming from. Is it possible that this is normal and each update is adding that much code to increase the size?

Are there any other common places to look for big files or even better, is there any addon that scans through the files and displays them with filesize so i can understand what is going on?

Thanks very much
Kind Regards
M

Have you ever figured this out? I notice the same.

Unfortunately no. I started again from scratch and after setting up everything the VM backup size was 1.8 GB. I did the last 2 updates and my 3rd backup is already 3.2Gb.

This time I kept the initial backup so I can return when needed.

I found a post about this. Check if your VM is set to SATA, not IDE.

I just changed mine from IDE to SATA and enabled ‘‘Space Reclamation’’

If you then scrub your HDD (at least on Synology) It also free’s up unused data on your VM drive.

Keep in mind, scrubbing can takes 6 hours or more.

Thank you I will check it!!!

I have tried to change the drive type to SATA but after the change Home assistant will refuse to boot. I tried twice first by changing only the drive type and the second time i removed the drive completed and set a SATA one pointing on the image. Still could not boot.

I am using Virtual Box.

Go into console of VM and type: Banner

If you get the cli warning type: Login.

If that doesn’t help type: supervisor repair.

It takes a while when booting, but it should work.