Pleco using ~8GB storage despite minimal visible data

[kasim]

Hi Pleco team,

I’m trying to understand why Pleco is taking up such a large amount of storage on my iPhone.

Currently, the app shows around 8+ GB under “Documents & Data”, which makes it by far the largest app on my phone — something that is quite surprising for a dictionary application.

What confuses me is that the actual visible files (flashcards, dictionaries, and a few PDFs) do not come anywhere close to that size. Based on what I can see, I would expect perhaps a few hundred megabytes at most.

To troubleshoot, I have already performed the following steps inside Pleco:

- Removed orphaned items
- Compacted databases
- Rebuilt database indexes
- Refreshed derived fields
- Cleared search history
- Cleared documents and bookmarks

After all of this, the storage usage decreased by only about 300 MB, and the app is still taking up over 8 GB.

At this point, I genuinely cannot account for where this data is coming from.

Could you please clarify:

- What exactly is included in Pleco’s “Documents & Data” on iOS?
- Are there hidden caches, indexes, OCR data, audio packs, or internal databases that are not visible in the file list?
- Is there any way to see a detailed storage breakdown within the app?
- Is there a safe way to clear unnecessary data without losing flashcards and user content?

Right now, this level of storage usage seems excessive and difficult to justify, especially given the actual content stored in the app.

I would really appreciate a detailed explanation or guidance on how to reduce this.

Best regards,
Kasim

 

[shaluig]

1,54 Go on my iPhone. Been using Pleco for quite 10 years and it has always took around this amount.

 

[mikelove]

I don’t suppose you have any particularly enormous user dictionary files? Or, say, hundreds of thousands of flashcards? That wouldn’t be 8 GB for any individual dictionary, but it could be quite large - there are a few user dictionaries floating around (BKRS for example) with half a million entries or more in them, and a dictionary that size plus a fast full-text index of it can legitimately run as big as 1 GB.

Other than that, my best guess is that this is some sort of a virtual memory bug - we do allocate large amounts of temporary memory in certain circumstances, like a database import, and it’s possible the system might have counted that as long-term disk space usage instead of short-term virtual memory usage. Did you try rebooting your phone? Normally that ought to be enough to reclaim the space.