Question

Hi, we would like to implement in our twiki a "cut" in the revisions available to a topic in order to keep the disk space needed for twiki on the long run finite. The idea is to implement something like: keep only the last x revisions on all (some?) topics.

The idea behind this is that expecially the (binary) attachments are rather space cnsuming if many revisions are created and kept.

I have thought that one possible solution for the attachments would have been to delete the atatchment one in a while and attach the new version from scratch. Unfortunatelly this does not work because:

• you delete the attach (it goes on the trash) -> ok
• you upload again the same attach (same name new version) -> ok
• you delete the attach again -> NO you get an error that the same attach already exist in the Trash, i.e. it can not be deleted

Oviously I could once in a while clean up the Trash but I find the procedure a bit too much at human error risk.

A clean solution would be:

1. as I have saied set twiki to keep only the last x revisions and delete the older ones by itself
2. give the possibility to the user who is editing the Topic to delete manually only the oldest revisions before uploading a new version.

I have seen that time ago there was some idea to develop in that direction ...... is it ready? Could you give me some hints?

Thanks.

Environment

-- CatiaLavalle - 19 Sep 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

I'd recommend making a script that will be run periodically that will clean things out. I attach here the one I run daily on my site which:

• erases debug.txt & warning.txt
• removes topics & attachements older than N days in some webs: N=0 in Trash (cleany daily), and N=100 for a Tmp web that users can set up temporary stuff in (vote pages, ). One could clean Sandbox this way

My script do not implement your solution, but it cleans the Trash.

I also from time to time do a: du -s pub/*/*/*,v|sort -n that tells me the biggest attachment archives so I can warn users and see what we can do depending of the nature of the document

• daily_cleanup: shell (linux, bash) script to clean webs of old topic/attachments

-- ColasNahaboo - 22 Sep 2007

TWiki is designed to have a complete audit trail and to never forget. So deleting older revs of an attachment is not supported. You would need to create a custom solution. The delete attachment twice issue is a known bug.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Oct 2007

I've just revised Colas' daily_cleanup script to not delete attachments supplied with system topics.

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Jan 2008