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Storage size reported incorrectly, no way to reduce

Richard

Initially, the total space used by my Confluence site was about 12 MB. I then attached many, many attachments to a single page, after which Confluence said the total storage used by my site was ~3.1 GB (which is more than the limit for free pages, 2 GB).

Alright - I click on show page details, and click through to the Attachments page, where I start deleting the attachments one by one. This quickly gets tiresome, so I have a better idea: I delete the entire page, go to Trash, and purge the page from there.

But now my site's storage overview page reports that I am still over the limit, using 2.1 GB!

I've gone to my space settings, and looked at all the sections under Content (Hidden, Undefined, Trash, Restricted) - no orphaned pages or attachments listed anywhere. I've also summed up the size of every attachment for my space, as listed under the Attachments section - total size is ~ 7 MB.

Finally, I exported my entire Confluence site in xml format. The size of the entire exported archive is 10.4 MB.

So - how do I find the 2 GB of space Confluence says I am still using? And how do I delete it before I'm blocked from creating in Confluence?

Accepted answers

Richard

Thanks for reminding me of the API!

No attachments with status archivedor trashed. 167 attachments in current; total fileSize 9'466'052 bytes (9.02 MiB).

I'll take this number to Atlassian Support…

All comments

Sami Shaik

@Richard,

Two things are going on, and the first one may already have solved it.

1. The number you are reading is up to four hours old. Atlassian’s storage page says the storage figures “are refreshed every 4 hours”. You purged the page and read the overview straight after; 2.1 GB is very likely the previous snapshot. Check again after four hours before deleting anything else.

2. If it is still over 2 GB, the space is in one of four places the export does not show. Your XML export is 10 MB because an export carries current content; the storage meter counts more than that:

Attachment versions. Uploading a file with the same name as an existing attachment creates a new version and keeps the old one. “Many, many attachments” on one page can be a few files with many versions. Space settings, Content, Attachments lists them; the version count is on each file. Deleting the page should have removed these, but confirm the page is gone from Trash (you said purged, good).
Trashed spaces. A deleted space sits in Administration, Trashed spaces, and still counts until it is permanently deleted. A deleted page’s trash is per space; a trashed space is separate.
Personal spaces. Every user’s personal space has its own trash and attachments. Yours included.
Other spaces’ attachments. Administration, Data management, Space reports sorts spaces by size, which tells you in one screen where the 2 GB sits.

One more honest note: archiving a page or space frees nothing; only deleting the attachments (and emptying trash) does.

If the four-hour refresh passes, every trash is empty, Space reports shows under 50 MB and the meter still says 2.1 GB, that is a sync fault on Atlassian’s side. Free sites do not get Support tickets, but the purchasing and licensing contact form is the route Atlassian Support pointed another Free user to for exactly this banner earlier this year. Post back what the meter shows tomorrow.

Martin Runge

Hi Richard, welcome to the Atlassia community.

I guess our XML export will not help much here. It does not show files that are waiting to be purged in the background.

@Sami Shaik is right, Confluence does not recalculate storage in real time.

Richard

Hi, @Sami,

I only have one Confluence space in my account, my personal space. But your comment reminded me that I had created and previously deleted some test spaces. I went looking for them in the [Confluence Settings → Admin Tools → Spaces] section and forcefully purged all Trashed spaces (none were archived).

Regarding versions: The attachments list that is reachable from the Details View (Ctrl Shift I) of a page has a fold down > next to each attachment listing all previous versions. The global attachments list, reachable from Space settings, does not show previous versions.

As far as I can tell, then, it can't be previous versions causing a problem, as I purged the page containing all (current and previous) attachment versions. And I've also purged all trashed spaces, which should have taken care of all versions of those spaces' attachments.

I should also have originally mentioned that I purged the page with excessive attachments days ago. And it's now been around 3 days since I purged all the Trashed spaces.

Despite this - still no change to the amount of free space reported.

You suggested the problem might be due to a sync fault on Atlassian's side. Is there any way to confirm this, or is there anything else I can do to find out what's consuming the extra space?

Sami Shaik

@Richard,

Thanks for the detailed follow-up, and you are right to rule out versions: purging the page removes every version of its attachments, and purging the trashed spaces removes theirs. Three days is well past the four-hour refresh window, so the snapshot explanation is spent. What is left is to measure the site yourself, independently of the meter, and then take the result to Atlassian.

1. Count the bytes Confluence can still see. The v2 REST API lists every attachment you have permission to view, with its size. Signed in as yourself, open this in a browser tab:

https://<your-site>.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/attachments?limit=250&status=current

Add up the fileSize values (bytes). Then run it again with the other status values the reference lists (archived, and the trashed status), because the meter counts those too. If every status together comes to a few megabytes, as your 7 MB space total and 10 MB export suggest, then nothing you can see accounts for 2.1 GB, and the meter is wrong, not your cleanup.

2. Take that number to Atlassian. On the Free plan there is no technical support queue, but the storage meter is a billing-side figure, so the purchasing and licensing contact form (Contact us, then Billing and licensing) is the route Atlassian Support has pointed other Free-site users to for exactly this. Give them the site URL, the meter reading with its timestamp, and your API total. That is the sentence they can act on: “the meter reports 2.1 GB, the API reports X MB across current, archived and trashed attachments, three days after the last purge.”

3. Post the API total back here either way. If it is small, this thread becomes the reproduction case for the next person; if it is large, we know where to look next.

Reference: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v2/api-group-attachment/#api-attachments-get

Richard

Thanks for reminding me of the API!

No attachments with status archivedor trashed. 167 attachments in current; total fileSize 9'466'052 bytes (9.02 MiB).

I'll take this number to Atlassian Support…

Sami Shaik

@Richard,

that is the number that settles it: 9.02 MiB of attachments across every status against a meter reading 2.1 GB. Nothing you can see accounts for the difference, so this is Atlassian’s to fix, not yours. When you write to them, lead with those two figures and the date of the last purge; that is the whole case in one line. If you get an answer, post it here, because the next person with a stuck meter on a Free site will find this thread.

Richard

My storage problem has now been fixed. Here's a summary of what the problem was, and how it was resolved, directly from Atlassian support.

The main takeaway: it can take up to 30 days for deleted content to disappear and the storage meter to reflect accurate usage.

I found that a number of records were stuck in a “pending_purge” state for your instance, which means that not all (actually most of) the content you manually removed from your site was still pending deletion in the backend, even though it wasn’t available in the UI.
For most cases, that resolves on its own within 30 days. Since you were looking for a more immediate solution, I had an ad-hoc round of our internal cleanup jobs take care of it. Since the Site Storage metrics are refreshed only a couple of times a day, it may still take a few hours for this to appear in your admin view.

Hullspark

Thanks for posting the resolution, Richard. For anyone who lands here later with the same stuck meter: this matches a known Atlassian bug, CONFCLOUD-85021. After a large number of attachments is deleted and the trash is emptied, the storage calculation in Atlassian Administration doesn't complete, so the report keeps the old total. The ticket is still open (Gathering Impact, unresolved).

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-85021

The workaround on the ticket is the same as what support told Richard:

Deleted data takes up to 30 days to be fully purged, so wait and check the storage report again.
If you need a correct figure sooner, contact Atlassian Support and ask them to verify the site's storage usage.

If you go to support, quote the ticket number together with your own attachment total from the REST API, as Richard did. Voting on and watching the ticket also helps Atlassian see how many sites hit this.

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