[tomsem]

I thought this might be of interest.

Recently I suffered the 'trauma' of running out of space on my Paperwhite, after finally getting around to trying to download everything in my library that I hadn't yet read. True, I have a number of image-heavy ebooks (technical books with lots of screenshots or photos). But things still didn't quite add up. Even after deleting one of my 50MB+ ebooks, the free space didn't increase nearly as much as it should have.

I almost never hook it up to the computer do anything, but I thought I'd take a look and see what was going on.

First off, there were a few screenshots in the root folder. But these took up very little space.

Then I looked in the documents folder.

Of the 'visible' files, there were a number of 'orphaned' .sdr folders. Normally, each document has a corresponding .sdr folder, which contains all of the 'sidecar' files (for annotations, page numbers, xray etc.). These should be deleted when the associated item is removed or deleted, but for some reason, this doesn't always happen. While they don't generally take up much space (a few KB), I deleted them anyway.

Then there were a bunch of 'hidden' files with these names (this is on a Mac using Finder, which I've tweaked so as to show hidden files):

.fuse_hidden*
.goutputstream-*

The '.fuse_hidden' files were relatively small, about 1MB each, and had modified dates ranging back to last November, about 2 per month. But the '.goutputstream' files added up to over 200MB, and were created back in January. These seem to be 'junk', temporary files left around when my Kindle crashed for some reason. Delete.

Finally, note that when you 'delete' stuff with Finder, it just moves things to a hidden folder on the Kindle 'drive'. You have to 'empty the trash' to complete the delete.

I started with only about 25MB free, after the cleanup this went to about 400MB free. I was able to finish downloading the rest of my 'unread' books and I still have over 300MB free.

Anyway, it was quite a worthwhile exercise, and one which I'll do a little more often in the future. You may want to do the same.