[Droid Eris General] ImaOldFart:
I'm not sure this is the correct place to post this info or my question, but I believe it is at least relevant to the topic at hand. If not, I apologize profusely.

I have numerous backups created with CWM (v6.0.1.0) that are eating up an enormous amount of space on my Galaxy Nexus SD card. I've been flashing numerous ROMs and Kernels and I want to get rid of most, if not all of those backups and then create a fresh one from my current working/bootable ROM (JB 4.1.1), just so I have a good backup to roll back to if/when I hose up my phone.

For poking around on the the SD card, I'm using a Windows-based program called 'Android Commander' (Google it), which I find to be exceptionally handy. It is very much like Total Commander, which I've been using for MANY years (since version 1.0 of the original Windows Commander) on Windows boxes, as well as a variant under numerous Linux distros.

At any rate, what I've discovered is as follows;

1. the contents of the /clockworkmod/ directory on the SD card contains three directories and a couple of files (in its root). The directories are;

/clockworkmod/backup/

/clockworkmod/blobs/

/clockworkmod/download/

2. the /clockworkmod/backup/ folder contains folders that are dated and time stamped (date and time the backups were created).

3. within each of the /clockworkmod/backup/date-time folders, there are six (6) files, the largest being the 'recovery.img' file. There is also a 'boot.img' file and four (4) other files that are quite small. Each 'recovery.img' file sizes are in gigabytes (yeah, I have a lot of crap on my phone), so it's pretty obvious that deleting these directories will give me a great deal more storage space, which is my main goal in life right now (recoup all that space).

4. my main point here, however, revolves around the /clockworkmod/blobs/ director. There are over 3000 sub directories within that directory, and I have no idea how many files are within those sub directories or how much space on the SD card they occupy, although my guess is around 8-10 gigabytes. Being an astute user of Google, here's what I found out about all this;

"Starting with version 6, duplication support has been built into clockworkmod recovery. The blobs directory folder contains a hashed directory structure that holds the duplicated files across all backups."

// This info was derived from a post on Android Enthusiasts (author unknown).

"Don't delete anything in your blobs folder. Those are your nandroid backups. Starting with CWM6, it makes incremental backups and your backup files point to the files in the blobs folder. To free up space, delete unwanted backups and the next time you run nandroid, it will delete the unneeded files in the blobs folder."

// This info was derived from a post by 'NotJustAPhone', a very senior member of the Android Central forum.

And for my next trick ... what I'm wondering is if it REALLY matters whether or not I blow away the contents of the 'blobs' directory, and I guess that's my question. What if I do delete everything in 'blobs'? Since I'm going to flash another ROM and Kernel anyway, does it matter? That directory obviously started out life as being empty, right? What will CWM do, or more importantly, NOT do, should I blow away the contents of the 'blobs' directory (assuming the file system will let me)? Won't CWM just create a new/fresh/relevant set of directories/files within 'blobs' the next time I do a backup? Has anyone actually tried doing that?

And just in case anyone is wondering, the only thing in the /clockworkmod/download/ directory is the clockwordmod img file.

Thanks in advance for any response this might elicit.

Old Fart