Some files have appeared in my documents folder on my A55-5G. They keep growing and when I delete them they reappear and start growing again. The files are:
.ect_inputlog.txt
.ect_outputlog.txt
ectsavedata_10min.txt
ectsavedata_1min.txt
release0721_S.LSI.txt
Has anybody else got the same issue and have any idea how to disable them.
It’s clearly not normal (to my knowledge, the A55 is also the only model affected). I and at least a couple of other people have tried reporting the issue to Samsung, but they don’t seem very reactive in fixing it. I haven’t received a reply from Samsung in over ten days by now.
I also don’t think that they are logs only from Knox ; you can see that various services and system apps write to these files if you have a look at the file details. Force closing the corresponding system apps may reduce occurrence of the logging at least for a while, but ultimately, Samsung needs to fix this. They seem to have forgotten to disable some debugging options/functions used in development.
Unsure because I always use power saving mode and haven’t tried disabling it, but I assume that power saving mode might also decrease the frequency of the logging
It’s probably better to regularly delete the files instead of letting them grow too big, because the whole file may need to be rewritten when appending data. This issue is rather annoying and I’m concerned about it wearing out the storage memory faster
Thanks Onox. I have also raised the issue with Samsung but no response. How did you determine what apps/services are using these files? All I see is a string of numbers. This is a real worry - if you are a regular user who doesn't look at their files, the space being gobbled up could be huge. Let's hope Samsung sort it out with next update.
Sorry for taking so long to answer ! By “file details”, I meant the Details metadata that is shown in the menu when you long-press a file in the Files app. In there, there is usually a “Source” field that shows the latest app that wrote to the file (unfortunately, examining the details of a file causes logging…)
You can try to force stop these system apps (you need to enable the toggle to show system apps in Settings > Applications) :
PhotoRemasterService SmartFPSAdjuster Perso Sticker Center (I’ve also seen DQA write to the logs, but this one turns itself back on when stopped, so no point in stopping it)
A few days ago, someone from Samsung support told me that they would pass the information on to the developers so that they would be able to fix this in the next update… I hope they actually do it, I’m also concerned that there might be other log files growing in locations we don’t have access to as a normal user, because my free storage space seems to have decreased for no clear reason
This will replace these files with folders with rhe same name, so that it's no longer possible to write to them. They will still be there but won't take up any disk space.
Thanks, this seems like a good idea (I didn’t know about Termux and wondered how to atomically remove the file and create a folder with the same name since the files are immediately created again), but it does not work for me… maybe I missed a step? Do you need root permissions or something?
Termux asks “remove write-protected regular file 'release0721_S.LSI.txt'?”, and when I answer “y”, I get : “rm : cannot remove 'release0721_S.LSI.txt' : No such file or directory” ! I made sure to cd into my /storage/emulated/0/Documents folder (I don’t have an SD card). Another thing I don’t understand is that the “ls” command lists my folders in the Documents folder, but none of the files are shown, even with “ls -a” ?
I saw these log files on my A55 5G and they've gotten quite large, the worst offenders being 234MB and 287MB. Almost all files are being written to by source app BrightnessBNR. The only exception is ectsavedata_10min.txt, which was last written to by Samsung Call Media.
