Cleaning up Storage on a Joomla WebSite

If you find that Cpanel is constantly sending you messages that you are short on storage, it is time to go on a server diet. If your domain is several years old, you will probably need to do some cleaning in several different areas. The article that follows gives some places to look for old files that can be deleted or offloaded, and easy ways to do so.

Old Akeeba Backups

If you use Akeeba Backup, you probably have it configured to keep the three most recent backups. If you are keeping more than three, you probably can and should download all of you backups and delete the older ones from the server. Many administrators download and delete all backups from the server for security purposes. To download easily on Linux, OS X, or Windows with Cygwin installed, use

This may take a few minutes. When the downloads are finished, delete the old backups through the Akeeba Backup web interface.

Delete Failed and Old System Backups and Reconfigure to Store Backups on Cloud Services

If you are really tight on space, CPanel system backups can fail, and leave incomplete backups around. Look in the /backup directory to see if there are old things lying around that need to be deleted. This is especially the case if you have an old installation and have backups from previous versions of Cpanel backup software. Look at offloading your backups to a cloud service like Amazon Web Services or one of the other services that CPanel supports.

Export and Delete Entries from Akeeba File Scan Tables

If you have Akeeba Admin Tools and use the PHP file scanning security feature, you can get a lot of entries in the file scan tables. You should clean these up using MySQL utilities. You should also look to make sure that your other MySQL tables are reasonable sizes.

Clean Up Email

If you have an account that has a lot of old emails that don't need to be retained, delete them. If you have emails that need to be retained, but don't need to be available on all devices, download them to local storage or export a file to get them off of the server. For small numbers of emails, copying to local storage using a client like Thunderbird is fine, but for large numbers of emails, it is easier to use the Horde webmail interface.

Convert Full Resolution Images to Web Resolution

If you have a lot of photographs that are full resolution and you have been resizing them for composition in HTML rather than resizing the files physically, you should go ahead and convert them to the web resolution. This will save space and make your pages load faster, but recognize that this may take some revisions to your HTML.

Get Rid of Old Install Images and Zip Files

The Joomla install process deletes the install zip files when it completes, but you should make sure that you do not have any failed install versions or plugin zip files in your root directory.

Backup and Delete Unused Extensions

If you have any disabled extensions on your web site, consider backing them up and deleting them. If the extension vendor has dropped the extension and you cannot download the version that is installed on your website, look at the Folcomedia Packager, and extension that creates a zip file of a package installed on your system. If the original packages manifest has errors, this may not work and you should test the .zip files before you delete the extension from your system.

Delete Unused Versions of PHP

If you have a Virtual Private Server and access to Web Hosting Manager, check EasyApache4 on your system to see if you have old versions of PHP installed on your system. At this writing, PHP versions prior to 7.2 are no longer getting security updates and should not be used, so go ahead and remove them and free up space.