How to store attachments on a separate network drive, as local disc space is not sufficient?

[Michael Aglas]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: How to change the attachments directory on JIRA

Directory junction is not working on windows for network drives and symbollink cannot be handled by JIRA. So how to store attachments on a separate network drive, as local disc space is not sufficient?

[Michael Aglas · Accepted solution]

Some information from my perspective. I was looking for a possibility to store JIRA attachment files on a network drive. So I tried to implement the workaround with using symbol link. There it was mentioned that using command mklink /J to create a folder junction... which does not work, of course, cause Win OS can only do so on local drive. I played a lil around and used mklink /D instead that creates the symlink, but when starting JIRA Service, it runs into an error: JIRA could not create subdirectory data/attachments. So it was bit frustrating, but finally I made a symlink of whole data folder, not only attachments. Make a guess, JIRA is running storing now attachment files and avatars on a network drive.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If I have understood this correctly, you've moved all of JIRA's home data onto a file share.

Do NOT do this, you need the index (and ideally the temporary caches too) on a local drive.

[Michael Aglas]

no, just the data folder inside homedir/applicationdata. there just lay attachments and avatars...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That doesn't sound quite right to me from "applicationdata", but I've not run JIRA on Windows recently, so they may have restructured things.   As the directory just contains attachments and avatars, and the <JIRA home>/index and other such directories are still on a local disk, that's perfect.

[Michael Aglas]

In this applicationdata/data folder are just two folders existing:Unbenannt.png

The rest for caching and so on is in above folder in other sub directories, so these are not touched. And I explicitly just link this data to a network drive. So there shouldn't be any complain about that...

Thank you for pointing out your concerns.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You have to mount the remote directory as a local disk.

On Unix based boxes, this is easy, you can just mount it anywhere in the tree and then replace the attachments directory with a symbolic link

As usual, Windows is a bit more of a pain, you either have to mount it directly into the tree (instead of as a drive) or use the mklink command to create a hard link.  Junction usually works, but as you say, it's not reliable for network drives.