Media isn’t federated. The media should just be referenced with a link to the original source.
Normally, the largest use of disk space is the Activity table. It is stored for six months, and only useful for debugging. Below is the Issue, along with SQL commands to check and purge this debugging table. Let us know if this was the issue
Oh my, you are correct. Images are being federated some of the time.
Like most everything else, the intended behavior isn’t documented anywhere.