How can I completely clean IPFS repo?

Question

After running following command, related: How do I unpin and remove all IPFS content from my machine?:

# unpin and remove all IPFS content from my machine
ipfs pin ls --type recursive | cut -d' ' -f1 | ifne xargs -n1 ipfs pin rm
ipfs repo gc

Size of the .ipfs repo still remains as it is:

$ du -sh ~/.ipfs
1.4G    .ipfs

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I can do rm -rf ~/.ipfs && ipfs init but my IPFS id is re-initialized where I want to keep my original peer identity without removing it.

I want to completely clean content of the IPFS repo. How can I achieve it? I observe that after removing pinned objects still size of the ~/.ipfs is not changed.

Answer 1

The ipfs garbage collector isn’t enabled by default and caches can grow unrestrained unless garbage collection is run manually or enabled to run on a schedule.

Try running Garbage Collection via the command

ipfs repo gc

Note: pinned resources are never deleted by the garbage collector.

Read more over here: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#garbage-collection.