Q: OS X Server 5 disk is running full in a few hours

While my disk wasn't filling up, I was experiencing the same issue with the creation of many files when turning on iOS sharing. While I'm not experiencing your disk space issues, I was concerned and did a little digging and thought I would share what I found.

From what I can tell, it looks like the server is creating a set of image files for each file in the shared directory to use when an iOS device is browsing the file directory. With the image files it is clearly true that the files created in /Library/Server/ServerDocs/ are smaller, thumbnail versions of actual images stored in my shared directory. This created thousands of image files, but none of them is very large and space consumption isn't a problem on the server drive in my case. I don't have any other media file types (eyetv, video files, etc.) in my shared directory so I can't compare file sizes on the copies to originals for those types of formats. Perhaps the server is creating small-format versions of the video content for preview on iOS devices, or some similar use, but this has a larger impact on disk space since the original video files are much larger to begin with. Just something for someone else to look into.

thx alot, this helped me.

I've just been dealing with this issue.  The ServerDocs / Data folder on my system drive is now taking up 985 GB of my 1TB drive.  I've deselected the "iOS" access on the 3 external media drives that I'm sharing over the network, and it looks like it's stopped creating new files in that folder. 

My question is, how do I safely clean up that folder?  I'm assuming the PNG files will be harmless enough to trash, but there are about 200 files that are showing up as unix executable or textedit.app documents.  3/4 of those files are between 3gb and 20gb.  The external drives are full of video files, so I'm assuming that those are some sort of unrecognizeable proxy files or something.  Anyway... am I risking screwing things up clearing out this folder?