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Greetings,
We've been archiving and removing older courses from our Production and Staging environments. We've removed several years' worth of courses, and presumably the associated files as they are not showing as orphaned content, but our disk space usage is not decreasing on the MH Insight Report. In fact, despite major purging efforts on Staging the disk usage is increasing. Our users do not access Staging, so no new content should be added that could increase disk space.
Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so, have you found a solution?
Thank you for any guidance you can provide!
Melissa Roach, MEd
Manager, Instructional Technology
University of Texas at Arlington
Back in March 2015 I asked support about this and here is what I got......
Alex-
Thank you for your response. I got with a member of our Tier II team and think I may have some information which will explain why the space was not recovered.
From what I have been able to find, this space may have not been recovered because of a functionality within the Xythos database that prevents files referenced between multiple courses from being duplicated unnecessarily. Essentially, two or more courses may have different reference handles to the same file, but deleting the content from one course won't free up more space if the files are still being referenced by other courses. So within the course, some space is freed up, however- the actual files that were referenced in that course weren't deleted because another course somewhere is pointing to them.
This could be especially the case in these courses because there were so many imported folders. I think most of the imported folders were from that BLAW set and in some of those courses, such as WEB-Fall-2013-70964-BLAW-2033-TC1, you can see in the course files that some of those imported folders are from courses that still exist. You could delete these folders from these courses repeatedly and no gain back space because there's an course still using those files.
There are some other ways to gain space back.
1) If the course isn't active and has attachments that were uploaded by students, you could clear those out by removing those files from the grade center column. This works for some courses, but may not make too much of a difference in this case.
2) Sometimes courses have a lot of archives in the Export/Archive Course area. This can also be found in courses in the backend by going to the archive directory of the courses listed there. I think you've already been there, though based upon your earlier information (Going to bb_content\vi\bb_bb60\courses\1\)
I apologize- but it looks like the main reason for what you are seeing in this instance is being caused by the information provided above, which appears to be functioning as designed. To really reclaim the space, you'd have to remove all course references to the files. My next natural question was "How do we find out which of these files are still being referenced where?" but it looks like we don't have any queries for this type of thing and it would be complicated to pull such a list.
I hope this information is useful.
Thank you,
Ashley Miller
Bb Client Support