How to remove the project (do not archive) in Central

[Matthew_White]

Hi @tcw!

@tcw

Can I second the need to be able to really delete, and also to track/manage space generally on ODK server?

Are you using DigitalOcean to host Central? If so, note that you have options through DigitalOcean to manage your RAM and disk storage. For example, we recommend the following in the Central documentation:

The size option affects a few things, but the most important is the amount of memory available to your server. Memory does not affect storage space, it sets the amount of "thinking room" the server gets while it's working on things. If you don't expect many forms to be submitted at once and you don't expect many large media attachments, you can start with 1GB. Higher-load servers and servers which handle many image or video attachments may need 2GB or more. It is pretty easy to upgrade to a larger size later.

You mention:

@tcw

At present, once the server is full of media-rich forms, it is almost impossible to do anything (you can't download, as the ZIP generation also requires space; it would be good if there was an option to extract just form data and not data+media in this case).

What do you see when you try downloading the submission data .zip file? Do you see an error message, or is the .zip file empty? Are you encountering another issue in addition to the .zip file download?

You may find this topic helpful, especially @LN's suggestions here. Let us know if you try one or more of those suggestions and whether that helps. (By the way, we'll soon be adding instructions to the Central documentation around the last option, adding swap.)

Down the road, I could see how it would be helpful to add an option to exclude media files from the .zip file, generating just the CSV files. @LN, am I right that Briefcase has an option already along those lines, to exclude media files from the export? Do you think something like that would be useful for Central as well? (CC @issa.)