Delete all versions older than 'x"
Asked by Karie Kelly:

We really need to be able to control the space requirements of our Confluence instance and the number of attachment and page versions is getting out of hand. It's not scalable to delete versions one at a time. About a year ago, I had located a plugin that allows you to navigate to a page and select multiple versions of a page or attachment to delete - but, I can no longer locate it.

Does anyone have a good solution besides hiring a temp at minimum wage to navigate to EVERY page and EVERY attachment and manually deleting versions older than 'x', one-by-one? This seems like it would be a common request of System Administrators or IT folks responsible for managing the db size.


Answers:
author: Karie Kelly
body: I finally found the plugin I was thinking of. But, realized it was pulling up for me because it currently doesn't support Confluence past 5.1.

[](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.pirateninjaunicorn.hide-and-seek)<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.pirateninjaunicorn.hide-and-seek>

Regardless, I'll take a look at Steve's idea.

comments: author: Davin Studer
body: If you have a non-prod Confluence environment try installing it there and using it. Often time they still work even though the marketplace oes not say they do. It is up to the developer to go back inot the listing and update it to say that it works with newer versions. If the underlying APIs have not changed between the versions it probably will still work.


author: Steve Thornhill
body: I'm wondering if you are thinking of this plugin?

[](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.confluence.plugin.archiving)<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.midori.confluence.plugin.archiving>

This would let you move old pages, etc to an Archive area where you can delete when necessary.

comments: author: Karie Kelly
body: Steve, we actually own that one. However, I need to keep the pages, but delete the versions associated with a page. Some pages have 100+ versions or their attachments do. We're trying to manage our space and want to clean up this up as well as minimize the risk of unwanted data in older versions (as security policies change).

There used to be a plugin that allowed you to delete specific versions that had create dates older than X within a page or space. I could also go into page history and select all version, and then manually deselect the last few and delete all selected at one time.


author: Steve Thornhill
body: Oops :)

Hmm, well another idea that springs to mind is a simple bit of shell script (or similar) Create it to navigate into the attachments directory and look at all the directories containing multiple versions. You could then report on that and remove older ones.

It shouldn't cause problems for confluence itself, but you may end up with dead links when looking at the attachment version view in a page.

I think someone else has tried this - came across this link

<http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/how-to-manage-attachment-usage-in-confluence-wiki-with-some-python-scripts/>


author: Karie Kelly
body: Thank you for the suggestion - I'll take a look at it.