Does archiving issues or projects help reduce storage usage in Jira/JSM Data Center?

[Laura Revello]

Does archiving issues or projects help reduce storage usage in Jira/JSM Data Center?

We are running Jira Service Management Data Center, and our instance is approaching its disk storage limits (400 GB). We're considering archiving older issues or projects to reduce storage consumption.

I've seen statements such as:

"If your main concern is storage space, you should either increase your storage or delete data, but archiving by itself does not save space."

Before making decisions, I want to confirm this specifically for Data Center:

• Does archiving issues or projects in Jira/JSM Data Center reduce disk usage at all?
• Or does all data (including attachments) remain on disk even after archiving?
• If archiving does not reduce storage, is deleting attachments or issues the only way to reclaim space?
• Any recommended strategies for managing disk usage in Data Center without losing important historical data?

Thanks in advance for your help and insights!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Laura Revello 

Archiving issues does not affect storage. The data is still present. The issues are simply removed from the visibility and removed from the index which improves performance related to issue searching and retrieval.

You need to first assess what data is actually consuming the space. Is it issue/project data? Is it log data that doesn't get aged off the system efficiently? Are your logs set to log too much detail.

If it is issue/project data that is consuming the storage, take a look at the answer on this post for some thoughts on how to reduce that consumption.

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Data-Center-discussions/How-to-to-minimize-the-attachment-space-issues-in-Jira-instances/td-p/1780548

[Chris Rogers]

Hi @Laura Revello 

Archiving can slightly reduce disk space because issues/projects are no longer in the index, but attachments remain on disk until the issue or attachments are deleted, whether they are archived or not.

If you have access to the database, some of the queries in this article is helpful for finding your largest offenders: How to get attachment statistics from the database in Jira Data Center 

One setting to check is the maximum attachment size (see the Configuring attachment settings section in Configuration file attachments). Users will commonly upload anything and everything to Jira, but it's not meant as a file repository