Our community (Tappara.co, in Finnish) is less than one year old. We have about 58k posts by 1000+ users. Images and backups are pushed to Amazon S3. Our backup size today is about 217MB and growing at a rate of 0.5MB - pace will pick up as the season starts in two weeks. According to OVH’s dashboard, our instance is already using about 46GB of data, which seems quite a lot. I perform /launcher and apt cleanup jobs regularly. I am getting slightly worried by the storage footprint of our forum, as we are in this for the long run. What are your numbers in terms of posts, users and storage consumed?

My forum is much smaller than this, so I’m not sure my experience is relevant here, however: how many backups do you have stored? If one backup is 217 MB is it possible that 46 GB result from (too) many old backups?

I was just looking at my backups during your reply, and noticed that Discourse (1.6 stable) was not respecting my setting for the number of locally stored backups (7). There were about a dozen of unwanted backups locally stored, but that only accounts to 2GB or so. Ping @sam

How much storage does Meta consume? I have now re-set the value for the number of stored backus. Let’s see if it starts behaving as expected. Rather big bug, since if unnoticed this can cause massive data storage bloat (daily backups).

Try running ncdu / on your server and diving down to see which folders are taking up the disk space.

Strange. On this one instance, Discourse still does not delete the automatically created backups according to my settings (7 to keep). I have been resetting the setting with no effect. Any ideas how to debug?

Hello, for anyone checking for that type of problem, Personally it was caused because of too many old discourse docker images. I gain more than 10 Go doing a little docker image prune

You should be able to clean using /var/discourse/launcher cleanup per the official docs as well.

What is the size of your Discourse instance?

Product Support Self-hosting

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) September 1, 2016, 8:56am 4

No repro – I’ve never seen that, so likely an artifact of setup or migration.

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What is the size of your Discourse instance?

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