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Suggestion
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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130
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19
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NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Server. Using Confluence Cloud? See the corresponding suggestion.
Description
We publish release notes in Confluence and attach software releases directly into the page. Sometimes a page ends up containing multiple versions of the software but only the latest release is being referenced (because developers forgot to delete the old attachments). There should be a way to detect "orphaned" attachments that are not referenced by any page across all of Confluence similar to how we can detect "orphaned" pages. I acknowledge the fact that some attachments may be accessed by external websites (and so shouldn't be removed) but in our case this is not the case and I suspect in most cases attachments that are not referenced on Confluence really are orphans. List these out for users and they will pick and choose which ones to delete.
Workaround
Retention rules were shipped as part of the Confluence Data Center 7.16 release. These allow you to set retention rules to specify how long to keep historical versions of attachments. You tell Confluence how much historical data you want to keep (by number or age of the versions), and then a scheduled job will delete the excess, in small batches, so as not to impact your site's performance. While this doesn't specifically help to identify and detect unused attachments (attachments that aren't referenced by other pages in the instance), it does help you manage attachments that are no longer utilised in your instance.
You can learn more about using retention rules to delete unwanted data by reading our documentation. You can also learn about identifying particularly large attachments in a space by following the guidance in this documentation.
Please upgrade to the Confluence Data Center 7.16+ to access retention rules.
- is duplicated by
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- Closed
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- Gathering Interest
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![[Confluence] Page](/images/icons/generic_link_16.png "[Confluence] Page")
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[CONFSERVER-16577] Ability to detect unused attachments
It would really be a big win for the platform if this feature was implemented.
Seconding that retention rules are not a workaround for this and in my opinion should be removed from the workaround section.
Has this been abandoned?
This issue exists since 2009, and in 2023 it is still "gathering interest". I am impressed by your diligence, Atlassian team.
Sorry but pointing to the retention rules has really nothing to do with the request of this ticket to being able to detect and optional purge/delete no longer referenced attachment. Mainly this will be no longer used old screenshots that was used in previous version that was already purged via retention rules from the instance. But the no longer referenced screenshots stays after the referencing page version already has gone.
So your mentioned workaround is NO workaround at all!
@AlutusTech: Are you planning on offering the plugin for Confluence CLOUD as well?
Hi d888d766a622
with regards the "Confluentis Unused Attachments" adon issues ... as far as i remember i had troubles as well and i tested this app in our test environment.
and had to deinstall and install it twice ... but at least i got it running ... and once more without this tool (finding tons of unjused attachments) the migration was not possible!
i just checked my e-mails and i saw the latest response from their support-team in january 2023
i wrote to support@alutustech.com
BR michael
I've learnt to live with excess, especially duplicated attachments, by running rmlint regularly, having it look for duplicates and hard-link them together. Now I get:
$ du --human-readable --summarize attachments/ 122G attachments/ $ du --human-readable --summarize --count-links attachments/ 321G attachments/
@Michael Ziegler,
We have used this addon as well. But with the change to DC the installation of this addon got blocking problems - no page-edit was possible any more. Therefore, we had it to uninstall.
But htis is the only addon I found for this.
At the beginning, the support was great. But now I cannot reach somebody at alutustech. It seems, that this addon is lost.
If someone has a solution to delete all or selected attachments of a page, I would be happy to hear from you.
Is 400 votes still not the right trigger to solve this problem? Retention rules are no workaround for this issue!