Storage
The Storage tab of the System screen, headed Storage and cleanup. It shows how much room the stores that grow on their own occupy, lets you say how long each of them is kept, and runs the cleanup without waiting for the daily one.
The tab is shown to administrators alone — for everyone else it is not in the tab strip at all, and a direct link to it opens the first tab instead. Both of the things behind it — the measurement and the cleanup — are open to an administrator only.
What a store card shows
Every store is one card. On its left is the store's name and a note saying exactly what the cleanup removes from it; on its right, the space it occupies on disk and the number of records in it.
How that figure is measured differs between stores. Creative files, Britva rule firing log and Version history of Drive pages are measured whole — an entire column or an entire table — and for those the card shows the compressed size on disk: the database compresses what it keeps, so the space occupied is noticeably smaller than the data laid end to end. Every other store is only a part of a live table, and for a part of a table the database keeps no on-disk figure at all. There the card shows the size of the data or of the files themselves, which comes out somewhat larger than the space actually taken. That error is deliberate and one-sided: the card may name a little too much, but it will never report as freed what has not been freed.
Retention period
Some stores carry a Keep for, days: field; others do not, and that difference is deliberate.
- A store with the field. Records older than the number of days entered are removed. Zero means keep for ever — until a period is set, nothing at all is deleted from it. The field is saved when you leave it; a value that is not a whole number of 0 or more is not sent, and the field returns to what was stored.
- A store without the field. It is always cleaned, and age has nothing to do with it: what lies there is the leftovers of records a person has already deleted. Such a leftover stops being needed the moment the record itself is deleted, not when it gets old.
| Store | Retention period | What the cleanup removes |
|---|---|---|
| Creative files | yes | The image or video file of creatives older than the period. The card, the dimensions and the analysis stay; the picture stops being shown, and usually cannot be brought back. |
| Call recordings | yes | The file of a recording older than the period, together with its entry in the call's list of recordings. A recording that is running right now is left alone. |
| Britva rule firing log | yes | Firing entries older than the period. The last entry of each standing hold is always kept, so neither the automation nor the «why is this ad paused» explanation is affected. |
| Bodies of deleted attachments | no | The contents of attachments their owners have already deleted. Live attachments are left alone. |
| Search images of deleted tasks and pages | no | The search images of tasks and Drive pages that have already been deleted. Live ones are left alone. |
| Files of deleted websites | no | Pages, images and stylesheets of websites that have already been deleted, with their edit history. Active websites are left alone. |
| Change history of deleted tasks | no | Records of who changed what in tasks that have already been deleted. The history of live tasks is left alone. |
| Version history of Drive pages | no | Earlier versions of Drive pages that have already been deleted. The versions of live pages stay, including work rescued from being overwritten. |
Everything in the table is deleted outright — there is no basket to fetch it back from. Before shortening a period, read the note on that store's own card: it says precisely what will go and what will remain.
Running the cleanup by hand
The cleanup runs on its own once a day. The Clean up now button at the bottom of the tab is for when you do not want to wait for that.
Pressing it starts the Storage cleanup background job — the same one the daily tick runs, so there is nothing separate to configure. The button reads Cleaning up… while the job is working, and the sizes above are re-measured the moment it finishes.
The button is unavailable while a retention period is being saved. That is not cosmetic: the job reads the periods as they stand when it starts, so letting it go at the same moment as the save could clean by the old, shorter period — and erase exactly the bytes you had just decided to keep longer.
The database performs deletions of this kind in a queue of its own. The figures above may stay as they were for a while after a successful cleanup, and on a very small store may even go up briefly.