Migrating Storage from Local to S3 Bucket

[Randy Calvert]

Hi guys,

I've recently moved all of the storage settings from using local files to an AWS S3 bucket.  The migration completed without issue and everything is working as expected.  (I did have to clear the system cache to fix some skin issues, but that was easy enough.)

After the migration, I was looking in my uploads folder and still see a bunch of content that I thought would have migrated.

[root@hooboy uploads]# du -h --max-depth=1
1.3M	./monthly_2021_06
1.8M	./set_resources_0
36K	./monthly_2021_07
208K	./monthly_2021_11
48K	./logs
56K	./monthly_2021_08
0	./emoticons
0	./monthly_2022_01
192K	./monthly_2021_09
4.0K	./reactions
40K	./monthly_2021_10
672K	./css_built_0
16K	./monthly_2021_12
200K	./monthly_2021_05

Would it be safe to assume the content in the monthly* folders are orphaned and can be removed?  

It looks like the css_built* and set_resources* are still stored locally even after moving to the S3 bucket?  

[Randy Calvert]

I think I managed to answer this myself.  I ended up cloning my prod instance into a dev instance and testing there to make sure I did not break my live site.

The files look to be indeed orphaned.  I took the filenames from the monthly* folder and checked against the Files list in the ACP and none of them matched.  And because I'm using Redis as my cache, the css_built and set resources folder were not needed.  I was able to remove everything except for the logs folder without negative impact.

Again, this only worked because my file storage type for emoticons, reactions, and everything else was set to S3 and that I was using Redis to cache templated files.  (I added this disclaimer in case someone else sees this later and think it just safe to randomly delete files in the folder.)

[Marc]

That would indeed usually be the case, just to confirm. We would always recommend making a full backup before deleting anything of course, in case you do find any issues. 🙂