Using Moodle 3.5.7 here. Recently deleted 400 courses and was surprised to see that my disk space usage actually increased by 5 GB! Is that normal? Can I get that space back and also 5 GB more? Thank you.
Sounds like Recyclebin behavior ... yes, it is 'normal' with default settings.
Site administration -> Plugins -> Admin tools -> Recycle bin
Enable is set to yes.
Item Lifetime you can reduce time - default is 1 week
Enable category recycle bin is set to yes and course lifetime default is 1 week.
Can reduce to days.
*** Auto hide is set to yes by default ... set that to NO so that admin recyclebin links will show all the time.
Last item will then show a recycle bin link in admin menus and will allow you to
make decisions about recycle bin files .... which are .mbz backups.
can delete them - kinda ...
In 3.5-> look in the gear dropdown menu of a course for a 'recyclebin' link.
normal behavior then is to save deleted files in trashier for 4 more days.
If in a pinch for space, one can use a file system browser (like in cPanel) or via command line and manually remove anything in moodledata/trashdir/
'SoS', Ken
Ah yes, I had done something similar to what you said about the recycle bin and it seemed to clear them out, but the space was still being used. I see that it all went to the trashdir. I will give it a week.
Thank you very much for the response, it helped.