purge Galaxy users and their data/histories/data libraries - recommended approach?

[AjitPS]

As the Admin of the Galaxy instance at our institute, I am trying to free up storage space by removing users who have left the institute or no longer use Galaxy (i.e., with a last login cut-off time of 3 years).

I can go into the Admin panel and delete a user, then purge them. But that doesn't get rid of all the data (to free up disk space/ quota) used by them. (similar to #930)

After purging some users, I tried running the clean_up scripts (in the recommended order) but that doesn't seem to free up space either. https://galaxyproject.org/admin/config/performance/purge-histories-and-datasets/#deleting-datasets-purging-dataset-instances

What is the recommended way of going about this?, i.e., permanently removing a user account and their data/histories. Thanks.

[mvdbeek]

So these instructions always require histories or HistoryDatasetAssociations to be deleted before any space is freed by deleting the actual dataset. I am not sure that deleting a users also deletes their histories, but that would be reasonable, I think.

[mvdbeek]

So one way to do this is to mark the deleted users' history as deleted, and I will see if we can add an option for that to the cleanup scripts.

[AjitPS]

Thanks, it would be useful if an Admin deletes a user via the Admin Panel, and then also purges the account, for all history and datasets of that user to be marked deleted so the clean-up scripts can remove them.

[AjitPS]

What I have currently are 30+ deleted and purged user accounts (including some using 4-5 TB of disk space) on our institute's Galaxy instance, but their disk space is still shown in use.

If I now undelete them via the admin panel, I can impersonate them but find no data/history in their account.

However, the clean-up script doesn't free up any of the space that we expected, as I guess the user is marked deleted and purged but the history/dataset if left as is in /database/files/. I thought it would be a userless history and so that clean-up script would remove it but it doesn't seem so.

Any advice on how to proceed and free up space would be helpful. Thanks.

[AjitPS]

If for all purged users, their histories are set to be userless, then that running that clean-up script: scripts/cleanup_datasets/delete_userless_histories.sh would free up all their user disk space.

[hexylena]

This will be fixed in #8309

I guess the current workaround would be to write some SQL to mark those user's histories as deleted, and then running the cleanup scripts.