Unexpected retention of removed / uncompressed attachments

Manage My Attachments ( MMA ) spends a lot of time looking at the Data Store for services with attachments. This is how it gets user’s attachments to render a gallery, support searching attachments, and perform in-place compressions. As a result, GEO Jobe has been able to observe some of the intricacies “under the hood” when working with services and their Data Stores.

When ArcGIS users delete an attachment from a Service which has Offline Sync enabled, the record for that attachment is not removed from the data store, but is instead simply flagged as inactive. This flag makes the attachment not show up in any of the ArcGIS interfaces, but it doesn’t actually free up the space it is taking up in your Data Store. This behavior occurs whether the attachment is deleted in the native ArcGIS Organization’s interface or it is deleted by a third-party application through an authorized API call.

Manage My Attachments, by default, uses direct database access through it’s Satellite application in order to apply the compression without removing the record. If you have opted out of that behavior, Manage My Attachments will fall back to using REST API calls to perform its tasks. If you compress attachments in your services with Manage My Attachments and do not see a reduction in the size of the data store (or even observe an increase in the total size), this is likely the cause.

GEO Jobe recommends using the Satellite connection to process attachments. If you do not wish to (or cannot) use the Satellite methodology, you may consider disabling Offline Sync on the Feature Service(s) that you are processing with Manage My Attachments. Alternatively, you will need to access the Data Store and delete the flagged attachments manually.

For assistance with removing deleted attachments from the Data Store for services with Offline Sync enabled, we recommend reaching out to our Professional Services, who has experience assisting with this process.