soft deletion for attachment and container

[phuang26]

• I am an ELNer / developer / system/ELN admin

Description

Please provide a description of:

1. what enhancement you suggest: soft deletion for attachment and container
2. why you think it is needed (You might provide a use case here): making them recoverable later

[jhmegorei]

• I am an ELNer / developer / system/ELN admin

Description

Please provide a description of:

1. what enhancement you suggest: soft deletion for attachment and container

2. why you think it is needed (You might provide a use case here): making them recoverable later

Some questions that come to mind

1) Who is supposed to use this feature?

• Should regular ELN users be able to recover their deleted attachments?
• If so, how should the interface look like and what permissions are required to use it? (in case of attachments on shared resources)
• If only admins can use the feature, how can a regular user request an admin to restore a deleted attachment/container (i.e. what data must a user give to the admin so they can find the deleted file)
• Should there be a list of restorable resources in the admin UI?

2) How is the server protected from running out of storage space?

• Soft-deleting files (i.e. marking them as deleted in database only) leaves the files on the server. Eventually the hard drive will run full. Are there any measures to prevent that? (offloading to S3 or other Storage Services)

3) What is the usecase on Containers being soft-deletable?

• From what I remember from our meetings, the underlying issue was that dangling files are deleted after 3 days and are thus not recoverable. How do containers play into this? Containers are usually created on Element Creation and can not easily be recreated by a user as far as I know
• How are subcontainers handled when their parent container is deleted? Should they be soft-deleted as well (and restored if a deleted parent container is restored)?
• What about attachments that are attached to a soft-deleted container? Should they be soft-deleted as well? (same case as with subcontainers)
• Which containers can be soft-deleted? (analyses containers can be easily created by a user, root containers not)

4) How are attachment files currently deleted?

• From what I understood in our meetings, deleting an attachment leaves the file itself lying around for some days until it is deleted. What process deletes the orphaned files? I found only a rake task cleaning the chunks, but this is not what we discussed here.