Why do I get notices of 20.2GB storage usage in a Space with only text and images?
Asked by Shaheen Dottridge:

I have a space using the free version of Confluence for an ongoing project. Our space contains under 100 pages made up of only text and some images, and when a team member used Python to pull the attachment size of each space, the total amounted to under 2MB used. Aside from attachments, there is only typed text.

However, we have been consistently receiving alerts that our usage is in excess of 20GB (much larger than the file size of our entire ongoing project) and our space recently got locked. Nowhere can we find any indication of any content in our Confluence space that is taking up 1GB, much less 20GB, aside from the notices we receive stating that we need more storage as the space is using 20.2GB.

Can someone please help figure out what might be happening here? We're at a complete loss of what to do and need access to our space to continue developing the documentation needed for our team to work.


Answers:
author: Dan Breyen
body: Hi [@Shaheen Dottridge](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5350721) welcome to the Community. If you are your site administrator, you can go to the select Administration from the 9 grid box in the upper left corner, or navigat to admin.atlassian.com and login to your account. From there if you click on the 'Products' tab and then select your site from the 'Sites And Products' group. Then on the left menu there should be a link to 'Storage' under the Site Settings group. Does this match up with your emails?

I'm not sure how you get an exact listing of what files are in use, but I would guess that's the number that Atlassian is going off of.

Hope that helps.

comments: author: Shaheen Dottridge
body: Hi [@Dan Breyen](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5086375) thanks for a quick reply!

It does match up with the number in the e-mail we received, so I expect you're right. I'm just not sure where the 20gb was added from. Also, it was my partner who noticed so I'm going by his word, but it seems to have basically been added overnight a few weeks ago. In the span of \~8-10 hours, we went from tiny to massive. With limits on single upload sizes, this shouldn't even be possible unless someone spent basically all night uploading the maximum allowable file size on a great internet connection.

We have also combed through the space and have found nothing that would even remotely come close to making up the difference between expected size and apparent size. We are really stumped.


author: Dan Breyen
body: It may take going page by page if you're planning on staying with the Free License.


author: Shaheen Dottridge
body: So you got me thinking and I found the problem about 30 second after replying. You can't see usage by space, but I found the culprit.

Disregard what I said before, if you read it. It'd basically an invisible attachment, I guess. The only place it's visible is in the attachment list but it doesn't show up on the page where it is supposedly attached.

Thanks a ton for the help! You set me down the right path!

The other head scratcher here is that our maximum attachment size is set to the 100MB default, so this never should have been possible in the first place.


author: Carlo Afford
body: Shaheen, can you explain this further?  

I have the same issue with our instance and running a REST query shows that we are only consuming 85mb but the UI is suggesting we have exceeded by 3.5GB which is practically impossible.

We don't have any apps installed and there are no attachments other than 10-15 jpegs on our wiki.


author: Carlo Afford
body: Well i managed to solve this by running a query via REST for all attachments, even those unlinked to an article and i found three video files that had somehow been uploaded by mistake.


author: Rodrigo
body: Hello and good day [@Shaheen Dottridge](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5350721),

I am writing to share other possible alternatives to review the space usage your Confluence attachments are taking via Third-Party apps in the [marketplace](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=cloud&product=confluence&query=attachments).

For example, our team (bitvoodoo), recently developed the [Instance Report](https://docs.bitvoodoo.app/viewtracker-analytics-for-confluence-cloud/instance-report), a new feature within [Viewtracker](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/28637/viewtracker-analytics-for-confluence?tab=overview&hosting=cloud) that can help you identify the storage usage, bandwidth usage, and number of spaces and attachments, among many others.

![Instance Report.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/289038iE4D91F45273B0B49/image-dimensions/238x253?v=v2 "Instance Report.png")

Perhaps this could be helpful for future cases to identify and troubleshoot similar situations.

Best Regards  
Rodrigo


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud