Contentstore has more files than referenced in alf_content_url

Question

I face a weird problem, for an unknown reason, I have more files in my contentstore directory than the number of lines in the Alfresco table alf_content_url.

I've been using the simple following Unix command:

find contentstore -name "*.bin" | wc

And for the database

SELECT count(*) FROM alf_content_url;

Of course, I also dealt with the orphans so the problem is not there.

Is there a reason why files would remain in contentstore directory when not referenced any more in the database ?

I'm using Alfresco Community version 7.3.1 as docker containers.

Thx

Answer 1

I see 2 reasons for these orphaned files:

• you did a db restore to a previous point in time but kept the contentstore
• the orphanCleanup job encountered an error while removing the file

The default behaviour of the orphanCleanup job is to ignore any error:

# The action to take when a store or stores fails to delete orphaned content
#    IGNORE: Just log a warning.  The binary remains and the record is expunged
#    KEEP_URL: Log a warning and create a URL entry with orphan time 0.  It won't be processed or removed.
system.content.deletionFailureAction=IGNORE