Health Check: Free Disk Space (Local Home)
Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.
Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
About the health check
This check warns you if the free disk space for your Confluence home directory falls below the recommended threshold. In clustered Confluence Data Center installations, this is called the local home directory.
DFS environments
If your site is running Windows and the shared home has been set up as a DFS (Distributed File System) link, the check may fail even if there is enough free disk space. This is caused by a JDK bug, which means the check looks at the size of the C: drive on the machine hosting the DFS link, rather than the size of the target of the DFS link.
In these cases, we recommend manually checking the available disk space.
What is the recommended threshold?
The recommended threshold is calculated as either a percentage of the overall disk partition where your local home directory lives, or an absolute size, whichever is smaller:
- 10 GB, or
- 10% of the overall disk partition.
Example
The formula we use depends on if your hard disk space is less than 100GB or greater than 100GB.
If you have more than 100GB total partition disk space, we warn you if your free disk space falls below 10GB, because it’s lower than the minimum size threshold.
If you have less than 100GB total partition disk space, we warn you if your free disk space falls below the 10% threshold, because it's lower than the minimum size threshold.
So as an example, if you have 20GB total partition disk space, we warn you if your free disk space falls below the 2GB, because it's lower than the minimum size threshold (10%).
Understanding the results
| Icon | Result | What this means |
|---|---|---|
 Pass | Your free disk space is more than, or equal to, the recommended threshold. | You have enough free disk space for Confluence to operate safely. |
| Pass | We can't verify the free disk space. | This usually happens because we can’t find the location of your local home directory, or if the application doesn't have access to the home directory. You can manually perform this check by reviewing your free disk space. |
 Warning | The free disk space is below the recommended threshold. | Your free disk space is running low. If the disk becomes full, Confluence functionality will be affected. |
What happens if I ignore the warning?
If the disk partition allocated to your home directory becomes full, Confluence will be unable to write things like log files or scheduled backup files to disk. Users will also see an error when attempting to upload files if the drive where attachments are stored has run out of space.
For clustered Data Center installations, attachments won’t be affected because they are stored in the shared home directory. Learn more about what's stored in the home directory.
Resolution
1. Review your current disk usage
It’s a good idea to check your current disk usage first, and free up some space if you can. Log files and backups can consume large amounts of space, so it’s worth looking for:
- Old log backups
- Old or excessively large log files
- Old automated XML backups.
Specific directories you may want to check:
| Directory | Details |
|---|---|
Application logs
| By default, Confluence keeps 5 log files, which are overwritten as they reach 20 MB. If you’ve manually changed the default settings, these may be consuming more space than necessary. See Working with Confluence Logs for details. |
Backup directory
| Depending on your configuration, backups can also consume a large amount of space. See Configuring Backups for details. |
You can also check the OS (Operating System) disk usage.
2. Provision additional disk space
If you're not able to free up enough disk space, you’ll need to provision additional space to the disk partition that stores your local home directory.