Reducing Disk Usage

Benecaster’s footprint is small — subscriber records, settings, and analytics snapshots add up to a few megabytes even at the Pro tier. If disk usage becomes a concern, the steps below cover the main levers, roughly in order of impact.

Before pruning anything, consider whether more storage is the simpler fix. If this data matters to you — long-term analytics, complete subscriber history — increasing your hosting plan’s disk allocation may be less trouble than working through the steps below, especially since a couple of them mean losing data permanently rather than just managing where it lives.

1. Set a Data Retention Window

The biggest single action you can take. By default, Benecaster keeps analytics data forever. Setting a retention window automatically prunes old records on a nightly schedule without any ongoing action from you.

Settings → Tools → Analytics Data

Options: Forever (default), 5 years, 2 years, 1 year, or a custom number of months.

The retention window applies to three data sets:

• Download proxy records — see estimates in How much disk space does Benecaster need? →
• Subscriber lifecycle events — subscribe, cancel, tier change records
• Daily analytics snapshots — per-tier subscriber counts captured each night

The download proxy log behaves differently from the other two. Every night, download rows older than 30 days are automatically summarized into permanent daily counts (by episode, tier, and app) and the detailed originals are removed — regardless of what you set this retention window to. So raw download-log growth is already bounded before this setting ever does anything; setting it shorter than 30 days is the only case where it changes what gets stored for the log. Subscriber events and daily snapshots have no such rollup and do grow with whatever window you choose here — they’re the ones actually worth tuning this setting for.

Note: If you use the Analytics Dashboard add-on, pruned data disappears from your charts permanently for the affected date range. If long-term analytics matter to you, keep the retention at Forever and manage disk usage through the other options below instead.

2. Use “Prune Now” for Immediate Cleanup

If you’ve just set a retention window and want to reclaim disk space right away rather than waiting for the nightly job, use the Prune now button in the same settings screen. It shows you a preview — how many records will be removed and how much space will be freed — before deleting anything.

3. Disable the Download Proxy

If you don’t need per-subscriber download analytics, turning off the proxy stops new records from being written entirely — though since download-log rows are already summarized and pruned automatically after 30 days (see step 1), this mainly buys you a smaller detail window rather than bounding the table’s long-term size, which the nightly rollup already does on its own.

Download tracking is a per-show default (Details → Show Flags → Enable download tracking), with a per-episode override on the Media tab (Inherit from show / Force on / Force off) for episodes that should behave differently from the rest of the show. If disk usage is the concern, your busiest recent episodes are where the records are accumulating — set the show default off and leave a handful of episodes on Force on, or the reverse, rather than having to choose one setting for the whole show.

Existing log data is not deleted when you disable tracking. Use Prune now to clear it, though note that rows older than 30 days will already have been rolled up into the permanent daily-counts summary rather than deleted outright.

See Download Tracking → for what the proxy does and how to decide whether you need it.

4. Delete Old Migration Backups

When you run a migration (importing from Patreon, Supercast, or a previous feed), Benecaster creates a backup file before making changes. These are stored in your WordPress uploads folder and listed in Settings → Tools with their file sizes and dates.

Backups are never deleted automatically. Once you’re confident a migration is stable — typically after a few weeks — you can delete the backup directly from the Tools screen. A reminder appears 30 days after each migration backup in case you’ve forgotten one.

5. Remove the GeoIP Database

If you enabled country and region tracking but no longer need it, you can remove the GeoIP database file from Settings → Tools → GeoIP Database. The database is roughly 150–200 MB on disk. Removing it stops geographic enrichment going forward but does not delete any country or region data already recorded against your subscribers.

6. Manage the Feed Request Log

Warning: The feed request log (benecaster_feed_request_log) can grow rapidly on active sites. A 500-subscriber show records approximately 24,000 rows per day — around 6 MB/day — and hits roughly 180 MB at the default 30-day retention window. On hosts with a 1 GB database quota (for example, SiteGround’s starter plan), this can consume a significant share of your allocation within weeks.

Two things to check:

1. Shorten the retention window — Settings → GDPR / Privacy → Feed request log → Retention (days). Reducing from 30 to 7 days cuts steady-state storage by ~75%.
2. Set the hard row cap — Settings → Tools → Feed request log → Hard row cap. The default is 5 million rows. On a small-quota host, set this lower so the emergency guardrail fires before you hit your host’s limit.

If you have no plans to use feed-request data for analytics or winback campaigns, you can disable the log entirely at Settings → GDPR / Privacy → Feed request log → Log feed requests. Disabling stops all new writes immediately.

The aggregate table (benecaster_feed_request_daily) is much smaller — roughly 150 KB per year per show — and can be kept at the default 365-day retention without concern.

See Feed Request Log Retention → for sizing math, the three retention knobs, and the emergency guardrail behavior.

7. Adjust Email Log Retention

Benecaster keeps a log of outgoing emails for 180 days by default. On high-volume shows this can accumulate. Developers can shorten the retention period with the benecaster_email_log_retention_days filter — see the Filter Hooks Reference → for details.

The count shown on the Orphaned Data screen is the number the delete button removes — both are measured against the same cutoff, so what you are told is what goes.