C5 becomes awfully bloated, does anyone agree?

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I’m currently trying to do a backup and upgrade to the most recent version and it literally takes hours to download all the files via FTP (calcuating the size of the “files” directory alone took several hours and used a significant amount of my system resources) because the longer it is used the more bloated it becomes. Is this really necessary? Should this be the price of its simplicity of use?

First of all, there is an “upgrade” directory which is obviously storing all the automatic upgrades. But why does it store every single old version that one has upgraded to in the past for eternitiy? I don’t need the oldest version when there are ten newer ones (in fact, I don’t even need at least the other eight newer ones, one for backup is sufficient). Then the “files” directory I mentioned earlier. This is just a huge pile of bloat! Every single version/modification of every single image is stored there in thousands of seemingly random sub directories, WTF??

Whenever a file is modified in the admin area a copy is created and kept for eternity. This is seriously becoming a problem if you have limited server space (and if you want to keep order in your webspace). I understand that the versioning system requires more space the more it grows but it could at least be sorted on the server in a way that one can figure out which files are safe to delete without doing this in the admin area. Or make something that deletes files/versions automatically after a certain amount of time.

I notice an Apple-like approach of designing the system: Always making it as easy as possible for even the most stupid and ignorant users out there, and therefore bloating up everything, storing it forever and randomly anywhere without ever caring where. And to find something the search input field is the main feature rather than a clean, well sorted file structure for the sane users.

Is it really necessary to make it such a pain in the ass for intelligent people that actually *care* about things? I hope the latest version of C5 is better (if I live that long to see the backup process finish and be able to install the new version).

 
mhawke replied on at Permalink Reply
mhawke
You've covered a lot of ground. Let me give you my thoughts.

I agree that the system holds too many versions of everything but if you set an absolute number of versions to keep, say 10, and a user saves the same broken page 10 times in 5 minutes then they have no good version to retrieve. I don't know the answer to that.

I'm fairly new to C5 (6 months) so I'm no expert but I found out long ago that backing up by downloading each file takes far too long and is unreliable but that holds true for most websites I build, not just C5 ones. I use the 'compress' feature in the File Manager of my host's Control Panel to create a zip file on my server of my 'public_html' directory. I then download that zip file to my local computer and delete the large backup zip from my server. My current site is 450M in size but I have every conceivable free package installed so I can learn how everything works. A production site wouldn't have them all installed.

You can also go to Dashboard->System and Settings->Automated Jobs and run the job to delete all but the last 10 page versions. I'm not sure if that job also cleans out the old assets such as old image versions or not but if it doesn't, it should.