Comment 2 for bug 1430620

Vte stores the scrollback buffer's contents on disk, that's what you see there. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631685, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664611 (and maybe a few other mainstream Gnome bugreports) about discussions and rationale why this was chosen. Quick summary: Running out of disk space is much less likely and effects the system less badly than running out of RAM, and your RAM would eventually make it into the disk (swap) anyways. And this is the only reasonable approach that allowed to implement unlimited scrollback.

Note that vte-0.40 will compress and encrypt these files, shrinking its data size (and hence extending SSD lifespan) by a factor of ~3-4x and also invalidating the privacy / data leakage concerns. This version will hopefully make it into Ubuntu 15.10 Whichever Wildanimal :)

As for SSD lifespan: I'm not really up to date, but a quick search suggests that it's not really an issue. E.g. this random article http://betanews.com/2014/12/05/modern-ssds-can-last-a-lifetime/ says you'd have to write 574 GB/day for 10 years, this is pretty much the maximum vte can produce anyways (on my Core i3 computer, cat'ing my 42 MB test file takes ~8.5 seconds, that's 420 GB per 85000 seconds), so you'd have to continuously produce output that drives the terminal to its maximum throughput for years.

That being said, I'm really not familiar with SSD lifetime issues so you might have better insight why my estimation above was wrong. In that case could you please support it with data, rather than just a feeling that it's writing too much?