MikroTik

I've updated to 7.16.1 5 days ago, and had to use netinstall to do that (now I know what the likeliest reason was...). That is, I netinstalled 7.15.3 (which is what I had the configuration backup for), restored the backup, and then upgraded to 7.16.1 normally. I also had to add the wireless package -- don't remember now if I did it before upgrading or after, but anyway back then there was enough disk space for that.

So either the disk gradually filled up during the 5 days the router has been up since upgrading to 7.16.1 & adding wireless, or it got filled up during the upgrade, or maybe both?

I've ruled out the obvious pilot error possibilites: there are no uploaded files or backups (i.e. disk appears totally empty), all logs go to memory.

So what do I do and where do I even begin to look? Can't even make a backup (no disk space!), so would _rather_ avoid another netinstall, unless there are really no other possibilities...

(had to netinstall, obviously, because of course)

So the research I've done so far makes me wonder: is there a way to compact binary backups? There are third-party utilities that can decrypt, encrypt, pack and unpack them (https://github.com/marcograss/routerosbackuptools for example) and the folks that wrote those have reverse-ingineered the format to sufficient degree. It appears that it should be possible to compact backups off-line by removing dead records from those IDX and DAT files. In fact I see no reason why config compaction would not be feasible on-line, right on the device!

Absent a way to compact the config on-device, it would at least be very helpful to have a way to compact backups off-line, which would obviate the tiresome "netinstall, carefully apply export line by line, oh you had certs and/or capsman lol lmao" routine which has become a periodic necessity for low-storage Mikrotik devices lately. I wonder if our illustrous vendor has an internal tool that does that? Maybe they would be willing to publisize it, just out of sheer embarrassment about the whole situation (I mean, I would be very embarrassed if I were Mikrotik)?