Managing the storage used by your courses depends on several factors, some of which we can adjust through configuration changes and others that depend on institutional policies, such as the number of academic years maintained on the platform.

Reviewing the data report (Insight report) and Blackboard Home

The report, which we access from Administrator Panel > Tools and Utilities > Data Report, shows us courses and organizations, as well as files, users, total space used and space used by file type, etc. It is an extremely useful tool for reviewing the space occupied and also locating where that space is.

We will run the report by selecting two dates (start and end) and (very importantly) the unit in which we want the data to be displayed (I recommend Gigabytes or Megabytes).

We will focus on the Overall disk space section:

Of these values, we are interested in the last one, which is the total space occupied by our instance. This number is the sum of the first two in the table: Shared content, which contains files needed to run third-party integrations, LTI, or B2, and Content System: All files, which contains all files uploaded to Blackboard. The space used by the application itself, or by our instance's database, is not included in this calculation.

If you use Blackboard Home (Administrator Panel > Tools and Utilities > Blackboard Home), you will be able to view your contractual limits and how much paid storage you are using.

Adding a quota to courses

Here you can see how to configure the quota for all courses created from this point forward. This measure will not help reduce the space, but it will help keep it under control in the future.

If a course needs more space than permitted by the quota, it can be assigned more space by modifying the quota for that particular course.

Limiting the maximum size allowed for file uploads

This is a good measure for controlling the upload of excessively large files to the platform. You can see how to limit the size of uploaded files here. Remember that this limitation applies both to files uploaded to courses and to student submissions, as well as to files uploaded by any user without the appropriate permissions. The maximum file size that an administrator can upload is always 10 GB, and other roles can be allowed to do so by granting them the privilege "People with this privilege can upload files regardless of the size limit."

Educating faculty on best practices

This will be the most difficult measure, since we have no choice but to inform and talk to faculty so that they do not try to upload files to the course that should be stored elsewhere, or so that they pay attention to the size of the files they upload. The previous point may help in any case.

In addition, eliminating the habits of doing things a certain way and cleaning up content that has already been uploaded can both take a great deal of time.

Deleting unnecessary courses

Do you really need to keep the 2011 courses? It may be worthwhile to review the university's course retention policy and consider how many years really need to be maintained, both as backups and on the platform for more convenient access.

If you have courses you do not need, archive and delete them.

Automatic backups

The system automatically backs up every day all courses and organizations that have been modified since the last backup. We have automatic backups from the last 30 days for all available courses. Once deleted or marked as unavailable, backups will be retained for 30 days. Consider your strategy for creating and maintaining these backups. Here you can find more information about the backup process and options.

Other topics to consider

• Remember that the space occupied by deleted files and the space occupied by automatic backups does not count toward the contracted storage space.
• System logs do count toward the contracted storage space. Review how many months (or years) of logs you have stored: download and delete anything you do not need.