Abe_stew Posted April 22, 2015 Report Share Posted April 22, 2015 I am currently using bittorrent sync at my office which has an annoyingly low 'roaming profile' limitation. Since using bittorret sync I have been constantly getting pop up notifications warning me I am over my roaming profile allocation. After doing a bit of searching in "username/AppData/Roaming" I found that the culprit was the BitTorrent Sync folder at an impressive 2.7GB. The vast majority of the files in the folder are long number strings followed by .journal . Is there an option somewhere to move BitTorrent Sync appdata folder elsewhere, or is it safe to clear out some of these files to free up more room? Cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ms2oo8 Posted April 23, 2015 Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 I have a .journal file that is sitting at 13GB.What do these files do and is there anything I can or should be doing to limit the size of this file? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted April 23, 2015 Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 .journal files are as a result of using a Journaling File System on Linux/MacOS Have a google for "disable journaling". Disabling Journaling will resolve your issue. If you're on a Mac, here's an article from Apple on how to disable it. UPDATE: Please see my subsequent post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abe_stew Posted April 23, 2015 Author Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 Thanks for the reply. However, I am using a Windows PC at work which is the one that has the issue with all the journal files - does your post also apply to Windows or is it something else creating the files? Additionally, if so and I don't have access on work PC to turn it off is it safe to just delete the journal files? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ms2oo8 Posted April 23, 2015 Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 I am running Windows as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
isalsowrong Posted April 23, 2015 Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 (edited) .journal files are as a result of using a Journaling File System on Linux/MacOS - see also this external article. They are not! The only case an ext3 filesystem contains a .journal file is when a mounted ext2 filesystem is upgraded to ext3 using tune2fs. If you create an ext3 filesystem directly (as has been done well over a decade) or e2fsck an upgraded ext2 filesystem, the journal is attached to an invisible reserved inode. In other words, modern ext3/ext4 does not have a visible .journal file. And even when it had, it was always in the root (/) directory. I also have .journal files in my BTSync application directory, and they are clearly generated by Bittorrent Sync:% tail -n2 <some long ID>.journal[20150408 21:55:08.172] insert file "/Users/xyz/BitTorrent Sync/Photos ABC/201502-201504" = 16777220:10449049[20150408 21:55:08.172] insert file "/Users/xyz/BitTorrent Sync/Photos ABC/201502-201504/XYZ" = 16777220:10449050(Directory names are anonimized a bit.) Have a google for "disable journaling". Disabling Journaling will resolve your issue. If you're on a Mac, here's an article from Apple on how to disable it. This is extremely bad advise, for any readers don't do this! Disabling the journal will mean that it will be much harder to recover a filesystem from a crash or power interruption. When your computer is started, the journal is replayed such that any metadata writes that were not completed can be completed successfully. Without a journal, your filesystem can be left in an inconsistent state in the event of a crash, because it might have been in the middle of a write. Edited April 23, 2015 by isalsowrong Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted April 23, 2015 Report Share Posted April 23, 2015 Folks, having spoken with the devs, I stand corrected - .journal files in the context of Sync are a kind of "per-folder log file". They should be safe to delete. It's also been flagged to the devs about the size that some of you have reported these .journal files have ballooned to (such as ms2oo8's 13GB .journal file!), as these files should probably also obey the log_setting, but it would appear that at present they don't. Apologies for any confusion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patoka Posted April 24, 2015 Report Share Posted April 24, 2015 I have a sync.txt file that is 186 gig, along with some data base files in the 20-75 meg range. Do I need these? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted April 24, 2015 Report Share Posted April 24, 2015 sync.txt? or sync.log? If it's the latter, then no, you don't need it, and its safe to delete. You may also like to check that you don't have debug logging enabled and that the advanced log_size setting isn't set too high. In relation to database (.db*) files - you DO need these, so don't delete them! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RomanZ Posted April 24, 2015 Report Share Posted April 24, 2015 @all,If someone of you got large amount of .journal files - i'll be happy to take a look on what happens inside. They should stay rather small as they contain only limited amount of operations on some selected folder. Please PM me and I'll share uploading link. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abe_stew Posted April 24, 2015 Author Report Share Posted April 24, 2015 Rather noob question but where is the PM button on these forums? Won't be back into the office until Monday but happy to send across my journal files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abe_stew Posted April 27, 2015 Author Report Share Posted April 27, 2015 Update - .journal files are not safe to delete. I went ahead and deleted the .journal files and now on starting btsync asks me to set everything up again and I am unable to link the PC to my identity as its apparently already linked. Any alternatives for linking this device since, as far as I can see, I can't unlink a device from another device and I can't access this device because it's apparently already linked!? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted April 27, 2015 Report Share Posted April 27, 2015 Update - .journal files are not safe to delete. .journal files within %appdata%\Roaming\BitTorrent Sync ARE safe to delete. I have confirmed this with the devs and in my own testing. Is it possible that you inadvertently deleted another file from that folder along with your .journal files? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
H2olt Posted June 1, 2015 Report Share Posted June 1, 2015 I've tracked down tho folder that's filling up my ssd, and I'm deleting these journal.zip folders momentarily, but I first thought I'd show how bad it is here. None of my files are overly huge, but for some reason I can't figure out, there are thousands of them, and the resulting folder is a substantial chunk of my SSD. Here's a snapshot of what my C drive looks like. I'll be happy to have these gonehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7N0QRolVUC4djVtbS1CVktzQjQ/view?usp=sharing -H Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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