Thanks for the fast response!
Those topics and a few more linked in them have become quite familiar to me while trying to solve this issue but unfortunately they haven’t provided any definitive solution to this problem.
Yesterday on the staging server I ran these commands modified for topics and posts deleted more than 9 days ago:
After this I noticed a slight increase in tombstone directory content size and I’m still monitoring the situation due to the grace period, still wondering if changing the relevant settings to zero hours/days would bypass the waiting time during testing.
Earlier on the original server I have tried removing uploads from the newest post revisions but the files were still available after the grace period.
At this point I’d be personally more than delighted to find out any working manual solution for permanently deleting even a single topic with its posts and uploads not referenced anywhere else, but this could be a big problem for other people running Discourse naturally assuming that the cleanup settings in the admin panel would be effective as described but not necessarily noticing if it’s not the case and ending up with potentially sensitive uploads expected to be permanently deleted but in fact staying in the filesystem. Our problem is luckily only considering wasted storage, but for someone else this could be much worse.
There’s another similiar mention just two months back:
How to Delete Uploaded Files? - #29 by gown
So, any tips on how to figure out if this is a misconfiguration on our end or an actual bug? We’ve been very happy with Discourse otherwise and I’m very motivated to solve this and help others on the way.