Mattermost Team Edition - Is the disk space allocated for storage of user messages and files meant to perpetually increase?

Hi, Question about the team edition.

I have up until this point been unable to find a way of cleaning up older message/file data on Mattermost team edition without having to re-deploy everything from scratch (destroying teams and channels and user information in the process).

Am I missing something here?

Of course, messages and file data uses disk space and as the life of the system increases the need for data storage also increases. Even if i provision enough space for 3 years today, at the end of 3 years my only two choices would be to either destroy everything and setup a new mattermost team edition instance or add more disk space.

Also, adding disk space in the linux environment isn’t exactly a piece of cake either. I’m not technical myself but based on conversations with sys engineers, it takes a significant amount of time.

Mattermost team edition’s low cost of deployment is definitely a huge thing and the idea of having to add disk space for eternity seems to be counter intuitive as well.

This is a massive problem for large teams that exchange a moderate amount of files.

Is there really no practical solution to this? Is my only choice right now to provision for 3 years and just add most disk space when needed.

This does not seem sustainable or practically to me, but maybe I am missing something.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Hi @alimirza_nva,

you could decouple file storage from the instance Mattermost is running at using an S3 endpoint. This could be provided by Amazon themselves (which would then theoretically grow indefinitely) or through a local service that implements the same api (such as https://www.minio.io/).