Whilst investigating as to why my magento 1.8.2 store DB was very large (over 7.4gb) I ran a query to see the table sizes and sort in order and I discovered that the sales_flat_quote_item_option table is 6880.58 MB in size which is most of the DB space. I do use custom options extensively (every product) but I think this cant be right. My guess is that this data is the custom option data customer have filled in when placing an order but for some reason it is not purged when an order is place or it is due to orders not being completed and the data remains. Would this be correct?

How do I deal with this? Is it ok to truncate this data or delete anything over 30 days for example? Im not sure if this is safe or not so am asking for advice.

Also , is there a way to stop this building up? For example having a cron hat deletes data over a certain age? Again, any advice is appreciated.