Cache/Config Confusion

First post, happily using Brave for a few months.

When performing backups I tend to wildcard-exclude “cache”. I do however like my “.config” directory backed up. About 60 programs have directories under .config. “du -sh” shows most are a few KB. The largest I have is 2.3MB Bitwarden … no, wait that’s the second largest. BraveSoftware is 323MB!

When doing a backup there are minimal changes to my configs but many Brave “config” files have changed - sounds like most of these 300MB should be under .cache. Thoughts?

(@Chocoholic) edited to add Brave version: 1.41.100 Chromium: 103.0.5060.134 (Official Build) (64-bit) and Linux 5.18.14-arch1-1

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@domesnow Hi and welcome to the community. :slightly_smiling_face:

I know nothing but tagging another community member who may be able to help. You might want to provide your Brave and OS version found at brave://version. That is basic information that usually helps community members and/or Brave staff when addressing questions.

@JimB1 Can you provide some insight? :slightly_smiling_face:

Not sure really – in my case, on my Linux devices I have a large amount of data in both locations. But it’s hard for me to tell what files under .cache/BraveSoftware and .config/BraveSoftware actually represent the ‘cache’.

Most likely, whatever you’re seeing is the consequence of either a. Chromium’s storage logic or b. the build parameters used during packaging. If you’re not using the package directly from Brave’s package repo, you could probably ask questions of the package maintainer. If you are using the Brave repo package, I’m sure there’s a way to find out there as well but not sure the best way; maybe GitHub?

On the other hand, an alternative approach to the backup process could be to just sync your data to a Brave Sync chain – as long as the data you consider important for ‘backup’ purposes are included in Sync, which they very likely are.

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Thanks, I’m using brave-bin package build from the Arch AUR which downloads a binary from github.

(https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download)

OK. Yeah, not sure I’m in position to say which are ‘ephemeral’ data and which are not.

Found a few articles which provide hints for Chrome, which probably apply equally here; here’s one:

I suppose one way to confirm would be to ‘Clear browsing data’ (Ctrl+Shift+Del) and see if one of them reduces significantly, and the other doesn’t.

(passwords are also in Bitwarden so OK to delete everything)

before/after - cache 357MB/927KB and config 324MB/280MB

looks like there was 44MB Brave knows should be under cache, leaving an unknown 280MB.

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