How to to minimize the attachment space issues in Jira instances

[Mahesh Kallepalli]

Dear Team,

We have all the attachments for old tickets. We are already over 500 GB for this drive, so need to find a way how we archive old tickets / attachments.

Kindly provide inputs to minimize the attachment space issues in Jira instances.

Regards,

Mahesh

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I think of Jira as having a standard efficiency when it comes to storing files.  It does the basics of storage - you give it a file that is X bytes in size and when it stores it, the file takes up X bytes on the disk.  Some applications are less efficient, storing the file, copies of it, permanent thumbnails and so-on, sometimes consuming 3-4 times X bytes to store.  Some applications are more efficient, compressing a file before saving it to disk (so a log file of X bytes may only take a fraction of X disk space).

So, to save space on a Jira system, you only really have three options

1. Move the attachments to a compressed file system (NTFS compression, BTRFS and ZFS are the ones I've used in the past.  There is some overhead in this, but if you only do the attachments directory, it won't cause problems, just feels a little slower when a human uploads or views (downloads) an attachment
2. Compress files before attaching them
3. Delete the attachments from the issues (or delete the whole issue).  Obviously, this will return the most disk space for you

"Archiving" isn't going to be much help here.  The point of an archive is that the data is still available if you need it, it's just not as easily findable in the main system.  You could "save" space by some form of archiving that takes the issues and their attachments out of the main system, but that's just taking a copy and putting it on another disk, then, on Jira, doing option 3 - deleting the attachment from the disk.

[Mahesh Kallepalli]

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Thanks for your quick response..!!

Is it possible that attachments related to older issues which are not required anymore can be moved out to a different path in a regular basis from $JIRA_HOME/data/attachments.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not if you want them to remain attached to issues.

If you yank the files out from underneath the issues, Jira will throw error messages on the issues.  Jira will still work, but people won't be able to view or download the attachments.

You'll also need to work out some way to record what files were removed from which issues - they're not stored with the file names you upload.

[Mahesh Kallepalli]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

We are thinking to migrate old tickets to new fresh instance using configuration manager plugin for Jira or project configurator for Jira. This will reduce some in existing instance.

Kindly let me know your thoughts on this approach.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, that will work, by simply shifting the problem to another system, but it'll reduce the size of the current one.

[Mahesh Kallepalli]

Thanks for your response. let me dig more if I found any alternative approaches.