Problem Definition

Currently, Confluence doesn't have a way to expire drafts. It is very unlikely that drafts older than a few weeks will ever be used and they may be forgotten if the 'drafts' page is not accessed.

Also, the drafts keep the attachments added to it, so they can take a lot of disk space.

There were cases where users were unable to generate Confluence Cloud backups because of the size of attachments. More than half of all attachments were associated to drafts, over 200GB.

Suggested Solution

Provide the following options, with a specific page this configuration:

1. A configuration for expiry draft dates (say, remove every drafts after 30 days with no modification)
   • We can keep this option as disabled by default, so by default Confluence continues to work as it does
2. An option to run immediately a job to delete all drafts that are older than a specific date, if the customer has the need to decrease the size of drafts
3. Provide information on draft space usage.

Workaround

There's a REST API call to delete drafts (it may not work with Collaborative Editing):

curl -D- -u <user>:<password> -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X DELETE <URL>/rest/api/content/<ID>?status=draft