Saving disk space

This article contains information which may be useful when reviewing disk space usage for your school's SEQTA Teach instance. Additional information is available in the article Storage space full warning banner (disk is becoming full).

In most cases, teacher resources attached to programmes (lessons etc.) are the greatest contributor to disk usage. Images and videos, or documents that contain the same sort of items, are the major sources. See below for information on how to minimise disk space requirements and free up space.

• Setup integrations to allow teachers to manage resources in a more central location. Please refer to OneDrive integration setup and Google Drive integration setup.
• Lower the maximum file size upload limit. The default is 32Mb, however, some schools may put this as high as 100Mb for staff and 50Mb for students. Check out the article Changing the file size upload limit.
• Encourage staff to remove resources from lessons they no longer require. See Uploading, Managing and Removing Programme Resources and Managing user files.
• Record media in lower quality. Many devices have the record quality set a lot higher then required for online viewing. This can greatly increase the size of the files,  for example one minute in 4K (UHD) is 84Mb verses one minute in 1080p (FHD) which is 20Mb. This is of particular importance for student submissions and when staff record student actions and presentations.
• ZIP files before uploading if they don't need to be transcoded. Transcoding stores multiple files in different formats and requires server resources to process.
• Don't use large inline images. Images that are dragged and dropped or copy-pasted into text areas (such as in the lesson planner and online lesson areas of a programme) are often at very high quality, and therefore have a large file size. Keep all inline images to sizes in the low KBs instead of using unnecessarily large images. Programme owners should carry out lesson maintenance to replace all outsized images, etc, with smaller versions. The note above about media quality is relevant to this point. In addition, if staff have access to a central, external area for storing large files, they can use a URL link in the lesson planner, etc, instead of embedding the original resource at full quality. See the Integrations article above.