Mysterious .dat0000.000 files flood my application document folder

Question

One of my apps has been in the app store for quite some time, and it has proven to be very reliable and stable.

Today I received an email from a user who said that in his company several application installations began to gradually take up huge amounts of disk space, on one device - up to 5 GB! Where usually, even with user data generated over the years, the application will not exceed 10 MB.

Upon closer inspection using iPhone Explorer, the client found a large number of files in the application's document folder, the size of which varies from 20 to 35 MB each, to be responsible.

These files are called, for example: .dat0065.01f or .dat009c.014, and they do not belong there. My application does not (intentionally) write these messages, I have never heard of them before, I have never seen such files in the document folder of my application on my devices.

So where do they come from?

Could this be some kind of (third-party) frame? I am using dropbox, testflight, GDataXML.

Does the naming scheme use a call for you?

And how can I start debugging this when it doesn't happen on my devices?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The TestFlight framework you introduced allows you to track how beta testers use the application. Having studied their documentation, I noticed a section on registration. TestFlight has the ability to write data to a file and then send this data to its servers in session end events. By default, this feature is ON .

This is a red flag. I would start there.

Link: TestFlight SDK Documentation