[Building Sakai] Attachments persist after containing tool and even site have been removed.

[Robert Cohen]

From:  Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>
Date:  Tuesday, 16 October 2012 10:07 AM
To:  Francois Campbell <francois at opencollab.co.za>
Cc:  <Sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Subject:  Re: [Building Sakai] Attachments persist after containing tool and
even site have been removed.

> Hi Francois,
> 
> This is expected behaviour. No content is deleted when sites are deleted.  The
> files and assignments will not be accessible after the site is deleted. This
> is so that you can restore the site if need be and then the content will be
> available again.
> 
> cheers,
> Steve
> 
> 
> On 16/10/2012, at 2:14 AM, Francois Campbell <francois at opencollab.co.za>
> wrote:
> 
>> Good day.
>> 
>> We have the following scenario:
>> 1. An assignment is created attachment only submissions with a project site.
>> 2. Student complete the assignments.
>> 3. Assignments are graded.
>> 4. At some point the assignment will be removed. At this point we wanted to
>> ascertain whether the attached files would be removed with the assignments.
>> My tests have some that the files persist after the assignment has been
>> removed. (Files also persist after the site has been removed, tomcat
>> restarted etc.)
>> 
>> My question is this the desired behaviour or is there something I am missing
>> ( configuration option, a scheduled garbage process etc. )
>> 
>> We have moved our content store outside of the default web apps location.
>> 



Being able to restore deleted data should be what backups are for.

This kind of behaviour makes sakai less suitable for use in production
environments.
Obviously not impossible to use, since plenty of sites are using it in large
production environment, but certainly harder to use.

Suppose, you have a large teaching environment with 1000's of courses
running each year.
At the end of the year you want to delete all the 2012 courses and create
new courses for 2013.
Except you don't get the disk space back,so you rapidly run out of disk
space.

Personally I think the poor backup facilities and lack of facilities for
cleanup up disk space are amongst the biggest weaknesses in sakai.


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