Advise: Persistence cleanup / growth issue

[zittware]

I have persistent working well with a Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS liveCD in an Automation environment.
As of late; i've noticed that the persistent FS is growing by just booting the image. IE after 100s of boots; the file system fills up to be totally full and eventually I have to "replace" the persistant.dat with a backup copy to restore functionality.

Looking for advice how to debug this "growth" issue.
Can I mount the presistant.dat file in another liveCD and "clean up"?
If so; how would I do this?
What should i look for as far as files taking up space?
Is there a way to force a filesystem check on the .dat file while booting? Would that help "clean up"?

Is there a tunefs command which might help limit the writes to the persistant.dat ? IE turn off journaling or something?

Obviously; I'd prefer to not have to regularly restore the .dat file in automation as that kindof defeats the purpose of having the persistence in the first place. 

Looking for any advice or ideas someone might have.

[longpanda]

Just  

Code:

mkdir  /tmp/xxx
mount  persistent.dat  /tmp/xxx

[zittware]

@longpanda
Can you shed more light on the mechanisms used for the persistent.dat file?
IE why type of FileSystem is it?

Can it be tuned to minimized writes?
IE tune2fs -O ^has_journal (https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-tune-linu...nd-tune2fs)

any suggestions on how to do that on the file?