Confluence creates phantom attachments when a page is copied?

Question

At my company we have many weekly meetings.  It is common practice at the beginning of the meeting to copy the page that contained the meeting note of the week before, change the date (which is part of the title) and overwrite the minutes with the new minutes from this week's meeting.   Recently I found that a meeting note had 123 attachments even though there were none on the page.  It seems that every attachment ever made during this meeting was attached to the latest meeting note. This is not desirable behaviour!!!

Is there a tool that can search and destroy these phantom attachments; that is those that are attached but doe not appear on any version of the page? Deleting 123 factorial attachments by hand could be considered a form of torture...

Stephen Ellwood · Answer

Thanks for the reply. Upvoted https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-19389.

We realised that one of our spaces has 47,883 attachments and uses 14.85GB on Atlassian Cloud servers. That's impressive for a team of 60 people! It was only when we looked more closely we saw this issue. Since we pay per user I guess its less our problem than it is Atlassian's. I am guessing fixing this one feature might halve their data centre storage space.....

From the Zen of Python :  Explicit is better than Implicit.

I recommend to either remove the copy page feature or fix it. At least the terrible workaround is explicit...

Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM · Answer

Hi @Stephen Ellwood

Would this be physical or mental torture?

If you add the attachments macro you should see the files attached to the page, and be able to delete them, then remove the attachment macro if not desired.

You used to be able to select "do not copy attachments" when copying a page, it now defaults to copying the attachments and there is no longer the option. There is a suggestion to add the feature back here that you can vote on.  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-19389

The workaround, which is a terrible workaround btw, is to cut and paste the content into a new page.