I have a free testing instance of Confluence Cloud.
One day, I was experimenting with uploading video files to see how Confluence handles them. I have a fast internet connection, so I didn’t really pay attention to file sizes—uploads were almost instant.
I ended up uploading a lot of videos and some PDFs.
But the next day, I noticed a storage limit warning in Confluence!
I figured, okay, that makes sense—those files must have taken up a lot of space. So, I started deleting them one by one from the pages. It was easy since I was only targeting videos.
After cleaning up several pages, I checked my storage usage. Nothing changed.
I saw a note that storage updates every 4 hours, so I decided to wait. But even after 10 hours (at least two cycles), my storage was still full.
That’s when I realized: deleting an attachment from a page doesn’t actually remove it! The file remains attached to the page, even if it's no longer displayed.
The Problem
Now the real fun began. I had to manually remove files from the page’s storage. But there was a catch:
Which files were actually used?
Which were just lingering in the background?
Even the file macro didn’t help—it didn’t indicate which attachments were still in use!
For me, it wasn’t a huge issue—I was deleting everything and moving my files to Google Drive. But along the way, I ran into corrupted files and other issues that slowed things down.
When I had almost everything deleted, an idea hit me:
💡 What if I could automatically check which attachments are displayed and remove everything else?
That’s when I started building the Attachments Cleanup Assistant app!
The Final Discovery
During development, I made another surprising discovery: Deleting a file isn’t enough!
Deleted files are moved to the trash, not permanently removed. So even if you delete an attachment, it still takes up storage until you purge it from the trash.
Once I figured that out and manually purged my files, my storage finally cleared up.
But by then, I was already deep into building my app. Now, you can check out my solution for cleaning up unused attachments in Confluence!
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1236523/attachments-cleanup-assistant?hosting=cloud&tab=overviewPssst… remember to purge your space trash! 😉