Maintenance

[Robert Jackson]

Hello all,

I have been using confluence for approx. 3 months now.  I have been monitoring logs for a while correcting issues as I have found them. (Mostly me breaking stuff like installing ssl and losing the ability to create a space since I did not update the Server Base URL in the General Configuration control panel).  

Banter aside: Is there any recommended Maintenance schedule that I should perform?  

I have noted that my server has started to accumulate quite a few backups (I am looking at 99 now).  If I do remove these backups would that interfere with my ability to view page history. I imagine that this backup is of some confluence databases and revision history is stored in the confluence database tables and not in these backups.  Is this a correct assessment?

Would there be any other things that would be considered confluence best practices?

 Thanks for reading all.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

For most systems, there's not much more than some basic housekeeping to do:

1. Keep an eye on the size and number of log files - you might want to consider some log rotation if they grow
2. As you noted, automatic backups will accumulate - it is perfectly safe to delete these, the page history is in the database.  Either set up a script to kill the old ones, or change the naming of them in the Confluence UI such that they overwrite older copies (if, for example, you used day of the week as the name, you'd only ever have seven of them, as next Wednesday's backup would overwrite last Wednesdays).  Note however, that the xml backups are not the recommended backup regime for medium to large Confluences - you should do those via standard database tools.  
3. As an admin, keep an eye on the system size and age of pages (there are add-ons that can help) and winnow out unused pages and personal spaces from people who have left.
4. As you're already doing, read the logs regularly, and look for problems

[Davin Studer]

To go along with Nic's point 2 it's not a terribly great idea to have your backups on the same machine that you are backing up. So, you should look at something a little more robust. If you have a more standard database/machine backup strategy already in place then you could turn off the Confluence scheduled backup task.

[Ingrid Nicholls]

Hi there,

I'm relatively new to Confluence... How do we see the logs and the backups? I.e. can we put some address in the windows explorer bar and then see the folder(s) where these are kept?

Also, how do we monitor the system size and see the old pages so that we can weed out things that aren't being used anymore?

Thank you,

Ingrid

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, not unless you've installed software to serve up the logs as web pages (bad idea, as it might leak sensitive information).

You need to go on to the server to check logs. 

Monitoring is a whole different topic - I'd raise that as a new question, as it's an interesting one, and deserves a wider audience than just the few people here.

[Ingrid Nicholls]

Thanks Nic, I will do that.