After a while, your WordPress site may become cluttered with old files that are no longer needed. Going through all of these files to see what can be removed can be quite an undertaking for a large site. To help ease the pain of going through files and figuring out what can be deleted, Pagely provides the ability to run a disk usage report from within the Atomic control panel.
Inside this article, we'll walk through the process of creating a disk usage report, then look at how you can use the report to identify unnecessary files that are taking up excess space.
Generating a Disk Usage Report
- Start by logging into the Atomic control panel.
- Once logged in, click on Disk from within the left side menu.
- On the top of the page, you should now see a section that displays basic information about your available disk space. To generate a new disk usage report, click on the Request Report button.
Depending on the size of your report, it may take anywhere between a few seconds to several minutes to generate the report.
Reviewing Disk Usage Reports
After a disk usage report has been generated, it can be accessed by clicking on the View latest report link located beside the Request Report button that was accessed in the prior section.
Inside this disk report, you'll see several tabs to help segment the data for easy viewing. Let's go over them.
Summary
The first tab is the Summary tab, which is exactly like it sounds -- a summary of your disk usage. Inside this page, you'll see a listing of apps and users' home directories alongside their respective disk usage.
Common Files
This tab lists files that often take up a large amount of disk space and can usually be deleted. Files such as SQL exports, backups, and logs are listed here. If you're running low on disk space and need to clear a few things out, this tab is the best place to start.
Deleted Apps
Inside this tab, you'll see a listing of any apps that have been previously deleted, but still contain files. It's always a good idea to take backups of anything before you delete it, but files inside these directories very often unused and can be safely deleted.
Large Files
Within the Large Files tab, you'll see a listing of the files that are taking up a larger portion of your storage. If you see any large backups or other archives that haven't been modified in quite a while, you'll want to consider storing them elsewhere to save space on your VPS.