Deleting Old Threads

support
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My forum is having a storage crisis at the moment. I want to reduce as much space as possible. What’s the typical storage space that a 3 year old forum takes? Mine takes up 49.9/50 GB which is atrocious. I’ve used ./launcher cleanup to try and reduce the space. I’ve tried clearing up my old docker images. I also noticed that the media folder is taking up about 15 GB. Of course, I wouldn’t want to delete all my media files. Hence, as a last resort, I’m trying to delete old threads (and thus I’m thinking if there is an option to delete old threads as batches). If you have a better method please do let me know.

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You can free up some space by keeping backups off-site, such as on Amazon’s S3. If you keep backups locally, you can reduce the number you keep.

/admin/site_settings/category/backups

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I did that too. I reduced it down to 1 and yet I’m still facing storage issues. I guess the only other option left is to externalize it to an S3 storage server.

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That’s hard to answer without more information: How many posts did your community create within those 3 years? And how much space does your postgres_data directory take? To illustrate, we have about 4.6M posts and our data directory is about 66GB. We’re a graphics oriented community though, so our much, much bigger than that.

I’d be surprised if deleting threads that contain no images would save you much space, and if it did, you’d probably run into the space constraints of your server soon enough. And since you can’t offload your postgres data to S3, you’ll need to find either a larger or more flexible hosting solution in the near future.

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I think that topics/posts are ‘soft deleted’ unless you delete them directly from the database (which could be viable, not sure, but would want to be sure unused image uploads get purged also).

So if you delete them through standard methods, it won’t free up space (except for the images attached to those topics/posts after waiting for them to be cleared out - I believe from the ‘purge deleted uploads grace period days’ setting). That is my understanding currently, not totally sure though.

Maybe using this might help as a temporary measure:
./launcher cleanup

IMO the best options for decreasing ssd/hdd usage would be to use S3 for backups like suggested above and also move your image uploads to S3.