Does "copy attachments" really copy the physical file attachment?

[Karin Berg]

Hello folks,

we use the automation action "Create issue" to copy specific information from an issue of one project A to a new issue of another project B. One of the information are the "attachments".

This works really fine but we are now worried about our storage limit because we copying the attachments. We have the Jira Cloud Standard Plan which has a limit of 250 GB of disk storage.

So my question is:
Does "Copy Attachments from Current issue" really copy the physical files or just create another link/reference to the physical files? 

Thanks for any answer

Karin

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I can confirm that when you copy attachments, it actually does copy those files, and not just makes a reference to the previously stored file.  Those copied attachments are also counted against the storage limit.

You can also test this yourself, when you click on an attachment, if it's an image in Jira, you can then right click on the displayed image and use the 'open image in new tab' for each copy.  You will see that the URL for each attachment is different.  These are uniquely stored attachments, even though one might have been copied from the other.

Andy

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Karin Berg 

interesting question. My guess would be that it is an actual copy so the issues' attachements can be edited separately. I tagged the issue for the Atlassian Team though, as that's internal details that I couldn't find documentation on.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think you've guessed correctly - you can test this by copying an attachment and noting that editing each one does not change the other.

Unless you genuinely need to branch the versions of the attachments, I would change the automation so that it says "refer to the attachments on the originating issue" and create a link instead.