Hi.
Both archive and deactivate are misleading. Archive does not archive any data, just puts the checkbox on Archived, which is visible when you edit a site. Deactivate does not deactivate anything, it puts the checkbox on deleted, which is visible when you edit a site. In both cases the site becomes inaccessible to everyone but the super admin. You are pretty much deleting the site in both cases with an option to easily reverse the deletion.
Thanks nnikolov. To free up space on our server, I was thinking of archiving/deactivating old sites and then copying the folders containing all the blog data to another server or file store?
Would this be the correct way to do it or is there a better way to do this?
Also, do I need to do anything with the database?
You want to free hard disk space? I guess you can mark them as deleted if you don’t mind that no one will be able to access them, including search engines and you will loose your rankings. And you can then make archives of their folders with uploaded media files and store them somewhere and delete them from your server. And when you decide to use them again you can upload them again and remove the mark from deleted. I don’t see any reasons for this to not work.
I wouldn’t touch the database, it is probably not worth the trouble. I assume that most of the space is taken from the files, not the database, right?
Yes i want to free up hard disk space. Just to confirm – if I ‘delete’ a site, does that still keep the data?
I don’t mind if users don’t have access to the site, search engines or losing rankings. However, I would like to move the uploaded media files to another location and have the option to re-activate the site if required in the future.
Yes most of the space is taken from the files.
If you click deactivate on this page /wp-admin/network/sites.php on a site, it will put a checkbox on the deleted attribute, visible when you click edit for the same site. This is “soft” deleteion, and can be reversed.
If you click the red link delete on this page /wp-admin/network/sites.php on a site, it will permanently delete the site, and cannot be reversed.
So essentially, I would want to deactivate. Then to free up space, I can manually move the data to another location?
