[ARCHIVED] What does "user storage is full" mean in the Discussions area?

[breaznea]

My students are using Discussions to upload their work so we can critique it. Several of my students are unable to upload their work to Canvas (though we’ve been doing this throughout the remote learning period) because it’s telling them their "user storage is full". I have just deleted a number of earlier discussion boards in hopes of making room for their work. Is this the problem? Thank you for your help with this.

[ericwerth]

Hi breaznea and welcome to the Canvas Community.  Users in Canvas have individual storage quotas.  This has probably been exceeded by the students who have received the error.   @James  had a good response about a similar issue here, User Storage Quota Exceeded Error.  Does the suggestion James posted help your students?

Thanks! 

[dtod]

There's a fundamental user interface problem, I think, with user storage. This is because if I attach or embed an image as a student in a Discussion, the image file gets stored in my personal user storage, not the course storage.

[ericwerth]

Hi  @dtod   This is interesting. According to several docs, it appears as though the image should count against user quotas if embedded in a discussion or attached to an ungraded discussion, but not if attached to a graded discussion (see How do I embed an image in a discussion reply as a student? and How do I attach a file to a discussion reply as a student?).  Have you seen the file attachment count against user quote in graded discussions?  It would be good to know  if the anticipated behavior is not occurring! 

[dtod]

Eric,

I just tested and assuming I did it correctly (entirely possible I did not), an embedded image in a graded discussion by a student still gets stored in user files.

[James]

Setting aside what actually happens, a student submission should not count against the course quota. The issue is that it gets uploaded to their personal files, which is where it belongs, and it counts against their quota, which I think is a good thing. The student is uploading a file to their space and so it should count against their allocated quota. There's nothing that says that student can only use that for a discussion.

The issue arises because the file was uploaded outside of the discussion (even when it's uploaded from within the discussion). Canvas doesn't have a normal sense of "this is a submission-related file so I won't count it against their quota." Canvas has a "this is a file linked from content" view of it and counts that against the quota -- both for course and user quotas.

Worsening the situation is that the students cannot delete the file to save space without removing it from the discussion as well. I just embedded a file from my personal files and then deleted it and it's gone from the discussion.

If a student wants to go through and clear out their files to lower their usage so that they can upload more files, they cannot go through and arbitrarily delete files that they think they don't need anymore because it can cause a loss of the submission record. Well, they can and there's nothing to prevent them from doing so. They can legitimately argue "I uploaded the file, it was there."

Media comments are the same way except those eat up space way faster than images to a discussion.

[ericwerth]

Just curious  @James  but what have you found works best to get around this?  My understanding is that if students are able to attach files to a discussion and do this, that it doesn't count against their quota but at the same time other students are much less likely to open the attachment.  I guess students could upload photos to an external website and link to these in the discussion?  Just curious if anyone has found a unique way around the issue!

[James]

I don't have a good solution, Eric.

I started disallowing attached files in discussions because few people saw them. I do not know whether it counts against their quota or not. The external website doesn't provide an audit trail like Canvas does, but both give you the issue that the student could delete the content before it was graded. Back in the days of web development, we were told to always shrink the size of files down. Now people aren't given that choice, have 4K resolution on their laptops, and wouldn't know how to shrink it anyway. My 10 year-old camera takes 4-5 MB jpg images, so if I uploaded 12 of them across the lifespan of Canvas, I would be past my 50 MB limit. Resolutions have increased since then and not everyone saves the image in high resolution like I do, but still ...

Some students use the Google and Microsoft integrations to embed documents in their discussions and that shouldn't count since nothing was actually uploaded, but students would see that more for documents than images (I haven't tried it with images). That had been problematic for me because of browsers blocking third party cookies. I think I finally have enough of them unblocked so that I can see everything that students submit. At least, it hasn't been an issue in the last year.

The biggest offenders for us back in April 2017 (the last I did any research) were people putting videos in a conversation attachment. There was a feature idea (now in cold storage) about this: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8405" modifiedtitle="true" title="Generate error message for u.... I gave some SQL against Canvas Data that would identify issues.

Also check out File Size Limit for File upload question in Quizzes where Erin Hallmark explained things and then came back with a succinct statement. "File upload limits should not apply when uploaded as a file submission." Discussion images are not a file submission and so that statement doesn't apply, which means they can count against the quota.

My concern is how the Adobe Scan is getting the files into Canvas and I haven't checked that one out, but I did have a student say that he couldn't attach his file from Adobe Scan with the mobile app but if he airdropped it to his laptop he could upload it from there. That makes it sound like Adobe Scan is uploading it first and then attaching it. We've been telling our students to use the Adobe Scan since going on COVID-19 shutdown, so this may be a bigger issue.

[ericwerth]

Thanks  @James   I was hoping someone had found a great approach here, but considering the situation I am not surprised there is no best solution at this point.  

Appreciate the insight!