Best way to prune an old large forum?

[MSUKForum]

Our forum has been going for 14+ years, the uploads folder has 75,000+ files, about 20gb worth when gzipped.

I'm needing to do a good prune of all this but I want to do it with as little damage as possible to existing posts/user uploads, how do people recommend I go about this? Is there a way I can do it via the ACP so it clears the DB too?

[Sonya*]

There is a solution here 

 

[MSUKForum]

1 hour ago, Sonya* said:

There is a solution here 

 

Thank-you. So by doing this, won't it break loads of images? I don't quite understand how it recreates them in the new directory?

[Sonya*]

20 minutes ago, jpointer2_merged said:

Thank-you. So by doing this, won't it break loads of images? I don't quite understand how it recreates them in the new directory?

I assume, that table core_attachments is read and all attachments listed there (if not orphaned?) are moved to the new storage. Hence all files that are NOT moved are not listed in the table and thus most likely no more used anywhere in the community. That's theory. It is worse to try it on the test environment. If you create backup of your uploads directory before moving, you can still manually upload missing attachments if something goes wrong afterwards.