The Attachment Archive Feature in Select 4.0

[joe.mag]

As we all know Select 4.0 uses the Blob database to store all attachments unless you set up an archive which then, based on a user-specified number of days, transfers files that have not been recently accessed to a directory tree on the local disk. That's about as far as the documentation goes. I have some specific questions about this feature but can't seem to find any documentation to assist me. Specifically, I would like to know if the attachment on disk is retained when the attachment is pulled into the Blob database cache or is it purged from the disk when it enters the cache. We're looking into enabling archive and need to make sure our backup strategy will handle the synchronization between the Blob db and the file system.

If there's no documentation could you help me map the directory structure to the correct blob table? It seems like an GUID field is being split at the dash symbol to create the directory sub-tree but I'm having trouble finding the actual linkage. If I had that I could answer my own question!

TIA.

[John Morris]

We never purge archived files from disk. If an archived file is brought back into the blobdb, it is also on disk. When it expires again, we don't archive it twice. At that point, we just remove it from blobdb records.

It is HIGHLY recommended that you use 4.1.1 or greater when looking into turning archiving on. There were some early stability issues in the prior releases. Those have been addressed in newer builds of Select.

[joe.mag]

Thanks for your help.