There is another poster with a similar problem.
They have a 20 minute show whose project is taking up 4,390 MB instead of the expected 643 MB.
Audacity Projects are larger than you think because Audacity runs in a very high quality sound format. It’s not a WAV file, or worse yet an MP3.
Maybe someone will drop in with some ideas.
Which Audacity are you using? There’s a fuzzy rule. Audacity 3.3.3 and 3.4.2 are reasonably stable, not so the two in the middle,
Koz
Koz