Just letting my VMs run overtime fills up their disk space, and requires me to resize them. I’ve just noticed this on my Personal Qube. All I use that Qube for is emailing small text files from other Qubes to myself. So, I’m just using qvm-move to move files over. The max size for the Qube is 2 GB, and even deleting the transfer folder does not seem to fully clear the growth.
/rw/userlocal seems to be where most of the growth collects. Which files can I delete in there?
you can install the console program ncdu and run ncdu /rw to explore what is taking up the space.
I noticed this in my debian and whonix templates as well. I think partially it is because of apt package cache storing cache locally. This thread might be related: 33 GB System Storage size usage on workstation template - Qubes-Whonix - Whonix Forum
Apt cache is in /var/cache/apt, so it should only fill templates over time in theory.
Yeah, it’s probably something being cached. Think it’s only /rw that matters for my issue. Looks like it’s my browser caching stuff. When I shutdown the machine Chromium does not close properly, and I have to restore my tabs. Think that’s creating a bunch of recovery files. Anyone know if there’s anything that can be done to address this?
I probably need to buy a new machine for what I’m doing anyways. Going to have to figure out which motherboards work properly with everything. The ThinkPad is great, but really shows it’s age. It’ll solve the problem probably purely by disk size, but the issue will still be replicated.
Just use a disk usage analysis tool like ncdu I recommended above to be 100% certain of the disk usage source in a few seconds.
Yeah, it’s Chromium creating recovery files. It has something to do with how Qubes shutdown. Think I need to hard link the Chromium cache to /rw
This is the default as /home/user is in /rw
Well, something is not shutting down properly which is unique to the VMs. Chromium is not saving state properly when the Qube shuts down, and when I open Chromium again I have to restore my tabs. That’s creating recovery files.
What is the path of such recovery files? I regularly shutdown qubes with chromium browsers and the disk does not fill 
Do you get the restore tabs message each time you open Chromium? The files generated live under ~/.cache and ~/.config. My disk is only 2gb per VM so any type of crash dump would add up over four years.
I have another VM doing it more quickly, but those are writes to disk from webapps. Haven’t had a chance to investigate the specific cause of that. I think it’s recording database changes on my disk. I probably need to clean my local copy of the database.
Yes, it asks me to restore tabs every time I start the qube and start chromium for the first time in it since the qube started.
Both directories ~/.cache/chromium and ~/.config/chromium are respectively 390 MB and 130 MB for me. The cache directory can grow very large depending what you do with the web browser, some websites uses this to store local data. I’m not sure, but for instance, MEGA downloads the entire file in the browser local storage (which translates to something into ~/.cache/chromium) before asking you to save it on disk. So, it may be a web service you use that fills the local storage of chromium?