We no longer use gravatar and therefore have 13 avatar files per user (we have ~ 880000 users and ~590,000 unique files) saved to data/avatars in a flat directory . We can’t even run an ls or find on that directory (we gave up after 6.5 hours). Only specialized tools like fpart are even able to traverse the directory, which takes ~42 minutes. This has caused us some pain with creating backups of our service, which means we are unable to reguarly backup avatars AND hit RPO targets.

Confluence handles this by having hierarchal avatar storage which is complicated, but effective (https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/hierarchical-file-system-attachment-storage-704578486.html)

In addition, we have noticed that user initials avatars are rendered into 13 unique PNG files per user (small to very large), which uses ~90kb of disk space, which seems like an inefficient compared to styling via CSS client side or storing one SVG per user.

Are there any plans for implementing a similar (or better) storage mechanism for avatars in Jira? 

Workaround:

Do not backup avatars.