Introduction
As a Confluence space owner or space admin, you are responsible for managing and maintaining the content within the space to ensure it remains relevant and useful for your team.
We hope this checklist will be helpful in assisting your Confluence admins to keep your Confluence responsive and easy to maintain.
About the review checklist
The number of files will definitely grow over time, so it is not realistic to expect users to housekeep to the same level
The purpose of housekeeping is not to create extra work for the space admins
There is no need to review each and every file in the Confluence space
There is little value to spend 1 hour to delete 60 files to free up 17MB of disk space
If it is painful to do housekeeping, users may be discouraged to use Confluence to collaborate
The purpose of the review is to identify misuse and excessive disk space consumption that leads to wastage.
By doing a review, it helps to check that people are using Confluence in the right manner
We recommend to do a review every 6 months or 1 year so that it is manageable
Implications of high disk space usage
Why it is a best practice to housekeep attachments in Confluence due to the following reasons:
Longer downtime - Version upgrades and backups take a longer time to copy the files
Slower response time - There are jobs running in the background to process the attachments which consumes CPU and disk I/O.
Slower search - There are more content to be searched
Higher hosting cost - Some hosting are billed on the amount of disk space used
Checklist for Space Admins
We have listed down on the various possible reasons that is eating up the disk space in Confluence and how you can check on them
Super large files
This is usually the #1 culprit and will be most effective in reducing the disk space used
What to check | Are there very large large attachments (e.g. >100MB) which are not supposed to be there |
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Why it happens |
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What you can do | Check out the largest attachments in the space and remove them if they are not required
You can also inform the Confluence admins to update Attachment Checker to block the undesired file types |
Many historical versions
What to check | Are there many historical versions of the very large files |
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Why it happens | Sometimes a file may have multiple iterations of revisions during the course of work |
What you can do | Remove the historical versions of very large files
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Trash not purged
What to check | Have you emptied the trash in the space? |
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Why it happens | The default policy is to retain all the deleted files in the trash and nobody ever go to empty the trash in Confluence. |
What you can do | Review the files that are safe to be deleted
You can also enable the Retention rules to clear the attachments that have been deleted more than 3 months. |
Recommendations for Space Users
To reduce the overheads of space administration, you may want to share the following guidelines with your fellow Confluence users
Understand the purpose of the space and what type of content should be added inside
Confluence is used for knowledge sharing and collaboration. It should not be used as their personal backup storage
Delete the historical versions if they are no longer necessary
Use a different filename if there is a need to retain that version of the file
Delete those files that are irrelevant or uploaded by accident
Everyone can play a part to flag out or delete outdated content whenever they come across any
Avoid uploading very big files unless necessary
Segment the content that are permanent and temporary under different pages so that it is easy to do housekeeping
You can also use labels (e.g. #canDeleteAfter1Year) to denote pages and attachments that can be deleted