Last few days have been 3.4GB and today’s backup is reporting 3.3GB - is this normal or does it sound like something’s up? I don’t recall any large (or image) threads being deleted..

What do you mean? Set a max image size in your site settings and that is indeed the max image size.

That’s true. That setting will prevent a large image from being uploaded at all. However, I think @AstonJ may be asking that if there is a feature in the system to: Accept an image upload from the user (up to some reasonable upper limit of course) Auto-resize that image to some max size (e.g. 1024) Not keep that original large image (in order to save storage space)

That’s already the case.. if you specify a max allowed, the images can’t be larger than that. I think it is in megapixels, so it’s about dimensions rather than absolute filesize, but the effect is the same. Rule 3 is met. There’s only so big a 128 x 128 image file can be, in bytes :wink:

I can definitely see a real use case for: Hell no… we are not an image storage service, maximal size of every image on the forum is 500K, we will drop fidelity till we get there on all of history… sorry everyone. I get that many forums that tire of giant old backups may may want to go down this path.

Right but we have exactly that feature it is just gated on pixel dimensions, not filesize per se. Remember we have to deal with pasted in images too.

Sam, I’ve been thinking about why our backup is so big when we don’t really have that many images uploaded… I think it might be because of the welcome DiscourseBot. From what I remember, it asks users to upload photos to help familiarise them with the upload system. I’m wondering, would it be a good idea to have Discourse automatically delete these PMs (and all uploads inside them) after 2 or 3 months after registration? It seems a waste hosting these uploads when they are not going to be seen by anyone and are effectively for testing purposes only… what do you think?

I like this idea. :slight_smile: It might be worth updating one of the welcome bot’s text strings to let people know that, as they’re only testing the feature, their images won’t be stored long-term unless they re-upload them. It could be spun in an encouraging manner; “feel free to pick any image - this is just a test run!” or similar would convey the information, while focusing on the positive - in this case the user not needing to worry about finding the best image, and instead just using whatever file is convenient. This is one of the things I really like about the Discourse team - their messaging always feels friendly and welcoming.

Can you run a data-explorer query to give some real world data about how much space DiscourseBot uploads really takes?

I don’t have that plugin installed but can add it :smiley: Could you give me the query you would like me to execute please?

Even though an old topic, since this has been on my table for ages I’ll just post it here as this is the newest topic relevant to this. Pictures might be easier for someone wondering about this in 2021 or something. Discourse forums really are long term archives for me instead of discussion forums far too often :frowning: . In autumn 2018 I noticed my backups for one site went through the roof (relatively speaking, small site :slight_smile: ). [backup_size_increasing_a_lot_suddenly_no_huge_upload_asaik] Today I just happened to see the old note about checking it out… and noticed the backup size is far less. Which got me curious. [backup_sizes2] I wonder what happened in October when sizes increased a lot :slight_smile: . Unfortunately I don’t have those backups anymore and a bit too lazy to go digging through changelogs especially as I don’t know when I upgraded and what. Looking at the newest tar, uploads are about 50M (14M optimized) and sql is 150M (28M packed). All this makes sense.

Is there any reason why daily backups would see a reduction in size?

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) March 29, 2019, 12:27am 22

Every setting you have described already exists.. browse through your site settings.

Topic		Replies	Views
Would it be worth resizing uploaded images (to save space)? Feature	26	5342	October 11, 2019
How big is your Discourse backup? Product Support	15	4032	April 25, 2016
Backups are duplicating and not respecting number to keep on disk Self-hosting	67	3289	February 14, 2019
Recommended backup process for very large forum? Product Support	6	1475	July 11, 2017
Disk usage spike during backup, Discourse crashed hard :-( Self-hosting server-resources	21	3106	July 23, 2020

Is there any reason why daily backups would see a reduction in size?

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