How to delete very old purged histories?

Hi there! I have some very old histories in my history overview. The histories have been purged and for each 0 GB usage is shown. However, I find it inconvenient to still have them in the overview. They cannot be deleted (the “delete this history” button is grayed out), while more recent histories can be deleted. Is there any way to get rid of the old, empty and purged histories from my account? Thanks!

Hi @cycle
By default, deleted and purged histories are not visible in History overview. To see deleted and purged histories, click at History icon in the left side bar, click at double tick icon in the right end of the search bar and tick Deleted and Purged boxes. After that you’ll see deleted and purged histories. I don’t think you can remove the history names from “deleted and purged” section.

Kind regards,
Igor


Not quite. When I use the “Show Histories Side-by-Side” option, I get the view as in the screenshot. In addition, my space is not purged despite I have all old histories shown with 0 GB and only one recent with 68 MB. Still, about 92.5 GB are found in my quota of 250 GB. Somehow, I cannot get rid of old stuff including disk space to be freed. Thanks again!

Hi @cycle,
So, you have one active history with 68MB, but your account uses 92.5 GB. Sometimes Galaxy does not recalculate the storage use. Click at your user name in the top right corner > Preferences. At the top of the middle window click at Storage Dashboard link. You can recalculate the storage use via Refresh button. The Dashboard also very useful for data management. Try it and see if you can get a proper estimation of quota use.

Another option: click at Histories icon in the side menu, at the right end of the search bar click at Advanced Search Options (double tick icon). Select Deleted. Do you see any deleted but not purged histories? Any chance you have pages with a lot of data?

I have many active histories and cannot check if purged histories are visible in side-by-side view.

Kind regards,
Igor

Hi @cycle

You can play around and set the defaults for the History Multiview.

In this screenshot, I have selected two histories, and then the option to set those as my pinned view is available.

The default view just displays whatever was most recently updated using a timestamp. However, I agree that it should ignore deleted and permanently deleted (purged) histories as a default action, regardless of the last update time, and maybe the prior pinned status. I’m going to think about this today and open a ticket to the developers for the change. More feedback about this later in the week.

Thanks for the feedback and hopefully you are able to customize your view! We can followup if you have more questions! Data purging takes about a full day. This topic was 3 days ago so that background process should be completed by now, but let us know if you still have odd updates in your storage dashboard and we can review more. The server URL and your username (not your email address) is enough. :slight_smile:

I noticed the same issue for a couple of my deleted histories, though I don’t think they are taking up space like a previous issue. It’s only been in the last month or so that the deleted history shows up in my active list, not consistently though.

Hi @Jon_Colman

I think this is working Ok now and changed my mind about excluding deleted/purged. Some people will always use this view instead of the history listing. They can customize what to show. The history name line will include an icon designating the state of the history: purged, deleted, or active.

I’m sure you’ve seen this! So this is just an annotated screenshot for anyone reading later on to clarify what we are talking about.

Thanks for following up! :rocket: