Cache unproportionally large

[Dražen Lučanin]

I am running Ubuntu on an SSD with very limited space. Out of the 12 GB I have assigned for my /home partition (which is enough as I only use it for documents, my multimedia files are stored externally), Deja Dup's cache folder takes up 3 GB!

This is unproportionally large for a backup service and is taking up my fast disk's valuable space. I'm not even sure there is a need for caching on SSDs, where reading is very fast and writing is the bottle neck.

Expected behaviour - the size of the cache should be proportional to the size of the files being backed up (e.g. if I'm backing up 9 GB, the cache should not exceed some 300 MB). If the cache must be this large, then it should be stored on the external target, e.g. my slow, but large external disk.

My information:

$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 12.10

$ dpkg-query -W deja-dup duplicity
deja-dup 24.0-0ubuntu1
duplicity 0.6.19-0ubuntu2

$ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.DejaDup > /tmp/deja-dup.gsettings
$ cat /tmp/deja-dup.gsettings
org.gnome.DejaDup backend 'file'
org.gnome.DejaDup delete-after 0
org.gnome.DejaDup exclude-list ['$TRASH', '$DOWNLOAD']
org.gnome.DejaDup full-backup-period 90
org.gnome.DejaDup include-list ['$HOME']
org.gnome.DejaDup last-backup '2012-10-20T15:13:15.728819Z'
org.gnome.DejaDup last-restore ''
org.gnome.DejaDup last-run '2012-10-20T15:13:15.728819Z'
org.gnome.DejaDup nag-check '2012-10-20T15:13:15.739500Z'
org.gnome.DejaDup periodic true
org.gnome.DejaDup periodic-period 1
org.gnome.DejaDup prompt-check 'disabled'
org.gnome.DejaDup root-prompt true
org.gnome.DejaDup welcomed true
org.gnome.DejaDup.File icon '. GThemedIcon drive-harddisk-usb drive-harddisk drive'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File name '500 GB Hard Disk: ubuntu-rezerva'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File path 'file://'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File relpath b'Glamdring-rezerva'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File short-name 'ubuntu-rezerva'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File type 'volume'
org.gnome.DejaDup.File uuid '51c42240-c8a0-4c9e-a362-6604215a7d2e'
org.gnome.DejaDup.Rackspace container 'Glamdring'
org.gnome.DejaDup.Rackspace username ''
org.gnome.DejaDup.S3 bucket ''
org.gnome.DejaDup.S3 folder 'Glamdring'
org.gnome.DejaDup.S3 id ''
org.gnome.DejaDup.U1 folder '/deja-dup/Glamdring'

[benvdh (benvdh)]

A similar problem is occurring on my laptop as well. It's running Fedora 17 and deja-dup basically backs up my home folder and etc folder. The total amount of data in my home folder that's being backed up is 16.7GB and 38 MB in my etc folder. However, the deja-dup cache folder is 21.8GB. That's a little more than a quarter of the total amount of disk space I have available on my laptop hard drive which is 80GB! Removing the cache didn't help as deja-dup just rebuilds the cache to the same size it was previously.

So can anything be done about this?