Seafile takes too much disk space for no apparent reasons

My YunoHost server

Hardware: Raspberry Pi at home on SD card 60 Gb
YunoHost version: 4.1.6 (stable).
I have access to my server : Through SSH | through the webadmin | direct access via keyboard / screen
Are you in a special context or did you perform some particular tweaking on your YunoHost instance ? : no

Description of my issue

Hello there!
I have a small problem with seafile.

For nearly 2 years, I had no problems. But since yesterday, seafile crashed (when opening the app, it says “Page unavailable”). I investigated a bit and saw that it crashes because the seafile-data/storage is near 60 Gb, so when it tries to sync, it exceeds the size of my SD card.

But when I look at the files I actually sync and are stored with seafile, I have no more than 5 Gb of data (see Figure below)

sizeused
Figure: Total size of all the files synced to seafile from 2 users

In the monitor app, we can clearly see that the size left on my SD card is rapidly decreasing over the last few months.
increasesize
Figure: Filesysteme usage for swap (in white) and yunohost (in red)

By looking at the actual files in my rpi, I managed to locate the folder/files responsible for this memory leak: around 20 files located in /home/yunohost.app/seafile-data/storage/blocks with hashed names. The size most of the files is shown below.

culprit
Figure: /home/yunohost.app/seafile-data/storage/blocks size

filesize
Figure: File size for the files in /home/yunohost.app/seafile-data/storage/blocks

Do you know how to fix this problem?
I think by deleting everything and re-installing the app, it should fix it. But I guess this memory leak will still be there and the problem will eventually come back.

Could it be that Seafile holds a complete history of these files modifications? Maybe check it’s settings?

This was exactly the problem!!!

After looking at the seafile parameters, I saw that all my folders where on “keep the full history”…
I set a limit of 30 days, deleted the history of my most used folder and followed this tutorial to actually delete the unnecessary files (and restarted the rpi once the garbage collector finished).

Thanks for your help!

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