Thoughts on having an archiving model for Confluence Spaces

Question

Hi All,

I wanted to get the communities thoughts on content management and archiving Confluence spaces that are no longer in use but we may need to keep.

I am wanting to develop a solution that will help us manage and keep our storage space down. Going to a higher subscription isnt an option right now.

In the past the solutions I have seen is as follows:

Option 1: spinning up another Confluence cloud instance where the non-active spaces are located. This has a policy where the content is reviewed annually and content gets removed based on certain criteria.

Pros: Means the main instance only have relevant content

Cons: extra cost to host another instance

Option 2: Exporting out the Space content into a PDF format and storing it on another platform i.e. internal intranet. Also, doing a XML export of the site and storing in that format so if user need it to be but back into confluence it is possible.

Options 3: Using the internal Archiving feature in Confluence Cloud. Using this function I wonder what happens to the storage aspect of your instance.

What do you feel about all these options and has anyone tried something different or similar?

Regards,

A

Levente Szabo _Midori_ · Answer

Hi @Anastasia Gourina

It's great to hear that you care about Content Lifecycle Management on Confluence Cloud! We at Midori have more than 10 years of experience in all things Confluence archiving with Better Content Archiving for Confluence and we always see that folks procrastinate until they have a painful problem and rarely think ahead.

I wanted to comment mainly on your 3. point.

While there are a few viable archiving options (like the PDF export one) I think archiving using the built-in features has significant advantages from both an admin and end-user point of view.

99% of our customers use the "Move" archiving strategy, which doesn't duplicate content and hides archived content from daily usage (but keeps it available). What we learn from them is that it does affect storage capacity since you keep stuff in the Confluence instance, but it's not significant enough to cause a real burden. They choose this instead of firing up and managing another instance or exporting content. On top of that, many of them review archived content after a number of years and permanently delete what's not needed.

If anyone has more feedback, I'm happy to hear it.

Anastasia Gourina_9k37wl · Answer

Yeah, that is what I have been thinking. Have you found doing the PDF export can sometimes change the formatting in a funny way?

marc -Collabello--Phase Locked- · Answer

My take is that I prefer option2 for most situations.  Having a pdf export available makes it clear for everyone that the content is read-only.  And having the XML makes going back to Confluence possible.