[Support]: canned solution to clean up "other" storage?

[dannysauer]

Describe the problem you are having

I've upgrade Frigate a few times over the years, and earlier this year I solved an issue (which I caused for myself) by just starting over. However, I didn't wipe the storage before doing so. As such, I have a bunch of cruft left over which isn't in the database. As discussed in #20563, there's a way to purge the database of stored elements which are gone, but I've not been able to find a solution for going the other way - I want to remove stuff from the Frigate data directory which isn't know to the database. The Frigate storage metrics say there is about 1.5 TB of stuff on that volume which isn't Frigate's. I don't want to delete everything in there, but I think the data directory should definitely be entirely owned by Frigate. So I think maybe what I need to do is put together a small script which lists files under data and checks for each one in the database, but before I start writing that script, I thought I should check to see if there's a "better" (aka "easier") option already available. 😄

Version

0.16.1-e664cb2

What browser(s) are you using?

No response

Frigate config file

N/A

Relevant Frigate log output

M/A

Relevant go2rtc log output

N/A

FFprobe output from your camera

N/A

Frigate stats

N/A

Install method

Docker Compose

docker-compose file or Docker CLI command

version: "3"
services:
  frigate:
    container_name: frigate
    # privileged: true # this may not be necessary for all setups
    restart: always # note: this sets the container to restart on boot, but any
                    # services deps in the compose file will not be respected.
    stop_grace_period: 30s # allow enough time to shut down the various services
    #image: ghcr.io/blakeblackshear/frigate:stable-tensorrt
    image: ghcr.io/blakeblackshear/frigate:0.16.1-tensorrt
    # https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/installation/#calculating-required-shm-size
    shm_size: "768mb"
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: 1
              capabilities: [gpu]
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /srv/frigate/frigate/config:/config
      - /srv/frigate/frigate/data:/media/frigate
      - type: tmpfs # Optional: 1GB of memory, reduces SSD/SD Card wear
        target: /tmp/cache
        tmpfs:
          size: 1000000000
    ports:
      - "8971:8971"
      - "5000:5000" # Internal unauthenticated access. Expose carefully.
      - "8554:8554" # RTSP feeds
      - "8555:8555/tcp" # WebRTC over tcp
      - "8555:8555/udp" # WebRTC over udp
    environment:
      - "PLUS_API_KEY=REDACTED"
#      - "YOLO_MODELS=yolov7-tiny-416,yolov7-416,yolov7-640"

Object Detector

TensorRT

Network connection

Wired

Camera make and model

Hikvision, mostly

Screenshots of the Frigate UI's System metrics pages

Any other information that may be helpful

No response

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Based on the available documentation, there isn't a built-in Frigate tool specifically designed to remove orphaned files from the storage directory that aren't tracked in the database(1).

The documented approach for cleaning up Frigate data involves either:

1. Manual deletion of media folders - You can manually delete the recordings and media folders, though database entries for these files will remain unless you also reset the database(1).

2. Full database reset - Stop Frigate, delete the frigate.db database file, and restart the service. However, this removes all event history and review items, not just video-related data(1).

Neither of these approaches directly addresses your situation where you want to remove files from disk that aren't in the database while preserving database entries for valid files.

For your specific use case with 1.45 TiB of "Other" storage, you may need to create a custom script that:

• Enumerates files in your /media/frigate directory
• Checks each file against the database
• Removes files not referenced in the database

Before proceeding, ensure you have backups of both your database and media files. The Frigate storage locations you should be aware of are(2):

• /config - Config file and sqlite database
• /media/frigate/clips - Snapshot storage
• /media/frigate/recordings - Recording segments
• /media/frigate/exports - Exported clips and timelapses

Check out these potentially useful sources: clean up database, Installation

📚 Sources:

1. clean up database
2. Installation

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