Does "copy attachments" really copy the physical file attachment?

Question

Hello folks,

we use the automation action "Create issue" to copy specific information from an issue of one project A to a new issue of another project B. One of the information are the "attachments".

This works really fine but we are now worried about our storage limit because we copying the attachments. We have the Jira Cloud Standard Plan which has a limit of 250 GB of disk storage.

So my question is:
Does "Copy Attachments from Current issue" really copy the physical files or just create another link/reference to the physical files?

Thanks for any answer

Karin

Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) · Accepted Answer

Hi @Karin Berg

interesting question. My guess would be that it is an actual copy so the issues' attachements can be edited separately. I tagged the issue for the Atlassian Team though, as that's internal details that I couldn't find documentation on.

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

Hi,

I can confirm that when you copy attachments, it actually does copy those files, and not just makes a reference to the previously stored file.  Those copied attachments are also counted against the storage limit.

You can also test this yourself, when you click on an attachment, if it's an image in Jira, you can then right click on the displayed image and use the 'open image in new tab' for each copy.  You will see that the URL for each attachment is different.  These are uniquely stored attachments, even though one might have been copied from the other.

Andy