What's in public_html/forum/attachments ?

[landyvlad]

www.gsx1400owners.org/forum

I got this message from my webhost

The user "gsxowner" (gsx1400owners.org) has almost reached their disk quota.
The account currently uses 85.13% (8.31 GB/9.77 GB) of its disk capacity.
Remove some files from this account, or ask the system administrator to increase the account's disk quota.

which surprises me because its a relatively small forum which has been running <6 months.
I wouldn't have thought it would be anywhere NEAR that size...

I looked in cpanel to see where the bulk of the files were and its as per the pic - primarily in the public_html/forum/attachments

Trouble is which on the face of it do not appear to be image files, but something else,
(see pic2)  I cant go into that directory in any way I know of to find out what they actually are. It wont let me open them through cpanel etc.

I had a look at the LOGS (error, general etc ) and noted that there were close to 900,000 (yep)  items in there. So I canned all those.

I assumed, or at least hoped, this might be where the problem lay but I should have  known better (small text files taking bugger all space) and the issue is unchanged.

So my next step is to ask for advice here.

What would the files be? What should I do?
'
Thanks

[Illori]

those are the attachments to posts and users avatars that are uploaded to the server.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

On most forums attachments are primarily image files.  File names are hashed for security reasons, that's why you can't view them in image editor.  If your members are posting a lot of images, you'll have to increase your disk capacity.  You seem to have a lot of stuff for a 6 month old small forum - /gallery, /Packages, /downloads, /tp_downloads, /test21forum.  A little housecleaning may be needed.

[Arantor]

Don't forget that packages will likely contain backups of mods being installed.

But there's definitely a lot of attachments and a lot of avatars that just got wiped out...

[landyvlad]

On most forums attachments are primarily image files.  File names are hashed for security reasons, that's why you can't view them in image editor.  If your members are posting a lot of images, you'll have to increase your disk capacity.  You seem to have a lot of stuff for a 6 month old small forum - /gallery, /Packages, /downloads, /tp_downloads, /test21forum.  A little housecleaning may be needed.

Yes I think that's due to the way the forum came about - an 'old' forum maintained by someone else disappeared so I started this 'new' one in it's place.  We therefore had the bulk of our membership join within a very short time, post pictures of their bikes and so on - a real flurry of activity. 
We'd also managed to save a lot of technical data from the old forums (which would include images and downloads) so that was uploaded to the new forum as well.

The test21 forum isn't too big and is what it implies - a test of SMF version 2

Don't forget that packages will likely contain backups of mods being installed.

Is there a way to identify these, presumably superfluous, backups?

But there's definitely a lot of attachments and a lot of avatars that just got wiped out...

Not sure what you mean here mate - I haven't deleted anything as yet so nothing should have been "wiped out" ?

[Arantor]

I misread your post, I thought you'd deleted the files but you deleted the logs.

Try going into the admin panel, to Forum > Attachments & Avatars > Browse Files and see what the attachments are...