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title: Maintenance
description: 
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AUTOMATIC_TABLE_OF_CONTENTS

Over time your Mastodon instance will fill up with messages and media requiring you to upgrade to a larger storage. 

To prevent this from happening too quickly, you may choose to delete older content.

## Local vs Remote

Mastodon distinguishes two types of content:

* **Content generated locally**, by your own users. This content is unique and should probably be stored for a longer period.
* **Content generated remotely**, by users on other instances. This content is essentially redundant can be deleted sooner.

## Cleaning Up Remote Content

The settings to clean up remote content are found by going to **Preferences** > **Administration** > **Server Settings** > **Content Retention**.

Our recommendations:

* **Media cache retention period**: **7**. Keeping this number low saves a lot of storage and because missing media is re-downloaded on demand, you can safely do so.
* **Content cache retention period**: **730**. 730 days equals 2 years. This means all conversation are retained for 2 years. After 2 years, remote messages will disappear from the conversation.
* **User archive retention period**: **7**. This affects temporarily generated archives only. It does not affect the actual content of your server.

## Cleaning Up Local Content

Mastodon does not provide instance-wide clean-up for local content.

You can encourage your users to enable **auto-delete** for older posts. They can do this under **Preferences** > **Automated post deletion**.