Going through similiar topics to gather possibly matching unsolved cases, here’s a good example on how these situations might even cause legal issues due to user uploads not getting orphaned and permanently removed like they should:
Another similiar situation all the way back from 2016:
These kinds of conditions create a huge opening for abuse and even targeted attacks for uploading illegal content that might not get permanently removed from the server even when the admins assume it would. Of course deleting single files manually straight from the filesystem is possible, but I don’t think people should be forced to take that route for such a basic need, especially when there’s a GUI setting indicating an automatic purge process and moderators often don’t have direct access to the server anyways. Also manual deletion is not practical with loads of files scattered around in different deleted topics.
Is here enough basis for an actual bug report? I’m still not ruling out possible misconfiguration on our end, but I’m baffled by the lack of error messages and everything else seems to be running just fine. I’ve spent a growing amount of days on troubleshooting and testing, gaining more knowledge about Discourse and its components in the process so I think with some guidance I could be able to help figuring out if there is some corner case detail triggering this weird behaviour. I hope it’s OK to ping @zogstrip at this point?
For a temporary solution, is it possible to manually move all uploads to the tombstone directory and use the upload recovery methods to restore only the non-orphan files back to their correct directories? I actually tried to do this today, but rake uploads:recover_from_tombstone didn’t restore any files. Could this be pointing to some bigger problem with uploads’ database entries?