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Workbooks Storage

By default, every new paid account in Workbooks is provided with 100 GB of storage and you can buy more space if required.  The storage allowance is based on your whole account, not per database. 

 

The amount of storage space you need depends largely on how much data you’re keeping in your account – the more customer records, emails, documents, audit data and so on you create, the more space will be required.

 

Storage needs can increase based on how your team use the system. For example, if you’re storing lots of emails (almost all of which will have attachments), call recordings, images and other uploaded files the more quickly your storage use will increase.

 

This page covers: 

How do we know how much storage is being used?

System Administrators can check the storage in use by navigating to Start > Configuration > Database > Storage Usage where you’ll see a screen similar to the one below.

  1. This is a summary of how much storage is allocated to your account, the total currently in use and therefore the amount of GB still available.  Remember, this is the total amount of storage in use across all databases on this account, including any that have been archived. 
  2. If you have more than one database, this will be highlighted.  To see how much each individual database is using, navigate to Start > Configuration > Account Settings > Databases, where you’ll see a screen like the one below. 

    Any database that hasn’t been logged into for more than 30 days will automatically be archived but can be restored at any time as long as your account is active. Archived databases contribute to your storage usage. Click here for more information on creating and archiving databases.

     

  3. This table shows the storage used by different record types or processes. This is a read-only grid for information only. Most commonly, database storage is used extensively in areas such as audit records, uploaded files, online activities, email and attachments but will depend on how you use your system.

 

When you reach 90% of your allocated storage, an orange banner will appear across the top of your Workbooks desktop. If you reach 100% of your allotted storage, the banner will be red and will inform you that your allocated storage has been exceeded. 

 

It’s important to take action to either: 

  • Reduce your storage usage or
  • Purchase more storage 

 

Otherwise, aspects of your functionality may be affected and stop working, such as creating data via the API. 

How do we avoid using storage space?

The best way to deal with excessive storage is to avoid it happening in the first place. For example, we advise against putting every single email that your Users receive into Workbooks as it will inevitably use lots of storage space (even though we compress emails that come into Workbooks so they don’t use as much space as they do within your email client). Similarly, do you need to upload files or could you store them elsewhere (such as SharePoint) and access them from Workbooks via a hyperlink? If you’ve integrated with a marketing automation tool which allows you to control what type of Online Activities are created within Workbooks (a feature of the integration with Force24, for example), we recommend that you give careful consideration to whether or not you need to see Online Activities for all Sends and Opens or just for click activity.

How do we reduce the storage being used?

There are a number of options that you can consider in order to reduce the space being used, which are outlined below. When deciding which steps to take, remember the following:

  • Deleting records from Workbooks ‘soft’ deletes them. This means they remain on your database for a period of 30 days so still take up storage space, but they are not visible or accessible to Users. Running a Clean Database routine will permanently delete those records.
  • Whilst permanently deleting records from your system will free up space, be careful about what you delete. Think about any reports or processes that might be based on the records you want to delete and the effect that deleting them will have on your database.

Ideas to help reduce the storage used

Here are some suggestions that you should consider to reduce the amount of storage used on your account. The amount of storage saved will differ from customer to customer and, in some instances, might not make a significant difference but nonetheless, the suggestions are good practice in terms of maintaining your database(s).

 

Import Jobs – import files and their associated uploaded files

Once data has been successfully imported into your system, you’re unlikely to need to keep very old imports, especially if they include large CSV files. You could set up a Scheduled Bulk Action to delete import jobs that were created more than x time ago. In addition, we recommend any import jobs with a status of Not Run (as long as you know you will not want to return to them later). This can be set up on the All Imports Landing Page.

 

Emails and Email Attachments

Even though we compress emails that are shared into Workbooks so that they take up less space than they do on a typical email client, email storage often accounts for a relatively large proportion of our customers’ data storage. For this reason, we recommend that you agree a policy with your Workbooks users about what should or should not be shared into your database. In addition, consider setting up a Scheduled Bulk Action to delete emails created more than x time ago, or those sent to/from specific addresses. This can be set up on the All Emails Landing Page. Remember, deleting an email from Workbooks does not delete it from your Exchange Server or your Email client, eg, Outlook.

 

Audit Records

Audit records can provide vital information about changes made to records on your database but as your database increases in age you may find a considerable proportion of your storage being occupied by historical audit data that’s no longer of value. In this situation, you might want to delete audit records created before a specific date. This can be set up within the Database Cleanup screen (navigate to Start > Configuration > Database > Storage Usage > Clean Database and open the Delete Audit Records reveal.

 

Note

Remember, if you have any reports or processes that rely on data provided by audit records, deleting these records will cause issues so please proceed with care.

Online Activities

Online Activities are invaluable in providing information on your customers’ and prospects’ interactions with web pages and emails. However, if you have high levels of traffic to your website and/or send out high volumes of mailshots, a large number of Online Activities will be created. Of course, you’ll want to retain the more recent ones or ones that track unsubscribes/bounces, but do you really need to keep Online Activities that are several years old? Are you sure that the ones that indicate an open or a click were generated by human interaction rather than a bot? If not, do you still want to report on them?

 

We recommend you develop a policy about what you keep and for how long and then set up a scheduled bulk action to delete the Online Activity records that you do not need.

 

Uploaded Files

All the files uploaded to Workbooks contribute to the storage used, including files uploaded to the Upload Library. There isn’t a mechanism to delete files en masse but they can be deleted individually. We recommend giving consideration to whether or not the files need to be stored in Workbooks. If they do, can they be compressed first to reduce the space required? Rather than uploading your fields, could you upload them to an Online Storage System and use a URL within Workbooks to link to that file?

 

Clean your Data

Whilst it might not account for the biggest chunk of your storage usage, any duplicate information held on your system will take up space. Similarly, if you still have inactive People and Organisations on your database, unnecessary storage will be used. (Bear in mind that depending on the business you’re in; there might be rules about how long you need to keep information for.) Think about deleting inactive or duplicate contacts from your system.

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