Minutes Cleanup

/minutes-cleanup

Help the user manage disk space and organize old recordings. Minutes is transcript-first: markdown notes and structured memory are durable, while raw audio is a temporary recovery/reprocessing layer unless pinned.

Check current usage

minutes storage
minutes storage --json

Present this to the user before taking any action.

Common cleanup tasks

Preview raw-audio cleanup

After transcription, the original audio files are no longer needed for search or recap. They only matter if you want to re-transcribe with a better model or debug recovery. Cleanup is preview-only unless --apply is passed.

# Use the configured retention policy
minutes cleanup

# Try a shorter successful-audio window
minutes cleanup --older-than 14d

# Machine-readable preview for agents
minutes cleanup --json

Delete raw audio candidates

Only apply cleanup after showing the preview and getting explicit confirmation.

minutes cleanup --apply
minutes cleanup --older-than 14d --apply

Archive old meetings

Move meetings older than N days to an archive folder:

mkdir -p ~/meetings/archive

# Find meetings older than 90 days
find ~/meetings -maxdepth 1 -name "*.md" -mtime +90

# Move them (confirm with user first)
find ~/meetings -maxdepth 1 -name "*.md" -mtime +90 -exec mv {} ~/meetings/archive/ \;

Archived meetings won't appear in minutes list or minutes search (which only scans ~/meetings/), but they're still on disk if needed.

Clean up processed voice memos

The watcher moves originals to ~/meetings/memos/processed/ after transcription:

du -sh ~/meetings/memos/processed/ 2>/dev/null

Clean up stale state

# Remove stale PID file
rm -f ~/.minutes/recording.pid

# Clean old logs (keep last 7 days)
find ~/.minutes/logs -name "*.log" -mtime +7 -delete 2>/dev/null

# Remove last-result.json (transient)
rm -f ~/.minutes/last-result.json

Gotchas

• Never delete .md files without asking — These are the transcripts. They're small and contain the actual value. WAV files are the space hogs.
• Prefer minutes cleanup over raw find -delete — The CLI understands pinned audio and sidecar stems.
• Archived meetings are invisible to search — minutes search only walks ~/meetings/ and ~/meetings/memos/. If you need archived meetings searchable, configure QMD to index ~/meetings/archive/ too.
• Audio deletion is irreversible — If the user might want to re-transcribe with a better model later, suggest pinning important recordings and only deleting old unpinned candidates.
• Pin exceptions in frontmatter — Add audio_retention: pinned to a meeting to keep its raw audio out of cleanup candidates.
• Audio is ~10 MB/minute, transcripts are ~1 KB/minute — Deleting audio saves 99%+ of space while keeping all searchable content.
• iCloud sync caveat — If ~/meetings/ is in an iCloud-synced folder, deleted files go to "Recently Deleted" and still count against storage for 30 days.