Why is trustd creating a 240Gb file in /private/?

Hi all,

I recently updated to Catalina (on a 2012 13" MBP) and have run into a lot of issues with the trustd process and the files it's creating in /private/. Specifically, there was a 240Gb file called TLS_analytics.db-wal in /private/var/folders/vq/xwh9qcp560lfl9_35z_fkdk40000gn/C/com.apple.trustd/Analytics which I deleted to free up space.

However, I'm now finding that, upon restarting, trustd is showing extremely high disk usage (but not CPU or RAM), which is causing finder to crash on startup. Additionally, it's creating a new TLS_analytics.db-wal file upon startup, which again becomes extremely large. I've tried resetting PRAM and SMC, as well as completely reinstalling Catalina, none of which have worked. My only solution now is to use terminal to delete the TLS_analytics.db-wal file every time I restart, which fixes the problem until the next time I reboot.

Does anyone know what the TLS_analytics.db-wal file is, and why it's causing a runaway trustd on startup?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 5, 2020 9:07 AM

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,138 points

Posted on Aug 5, 2020 9:26 AM

It is the "Write Ahead Log" for the TLS_analytics.db SQLite3 database. Not sure why that database exists, but it appears there is something wrong with the main database such that the WAL never gets cleared as the main database file (plain .db) is updated.

You might want to just delete all three files, the .db, .db-wal, and .db-shm. That should make it start all over, but hopefully not run away as it has been doing.

I don't think anything problematic will happen deleting all of those, but I haven't tried myself.

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Why is trustd creating a 240Gb file in /private/?

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