Transfer Appian KC documents from Appian KC to New Common folder within same server

Question

Hi Team, 
 We have Appian 18.2 on-premise installation where the documents are presently stored within Appian KC's. We now plan to move these documents to an external file share server. However since the file share server does not support SFTP or FTP connection, we have to first move these documents to a central folder within the same server where Appian is hosted on. 
 For this we tried to send document using the SFTP plugins Smart Service - Send File Over SFTP (Basic Credentials) and Send File over FTP. Both these nodes error out with an error message as "Error establishing SFTP connection. Confirm your hostname, username and password. See application server log for more details. Error Message: Auth fail" and "Stream handler unavailable due to: null" respectively. 
 Now we need to know, if we should have a FTP server installed on the server where the Appian platform is hosted even for internal transfers? 
 And is there any alternative (can be even not using the plugins) for first collecting these documents at a central location and then transferring them to the fileshare. 
 Thanks in advance!!. 
 Regards, Himanshu

Raghuvaran Nagarajan · Answer

HI Himanshu, 
 If the documents are currently stored in Appian's knowledge centers, The folder structure inside Appian /design view and in the server hosting these files will be completely different. You cannot expect the same folder structure in the server. Appian internally maintains the mapping between a appian document and its physical location in the host server and this is available to external parties only via JAVA APIs. 
 If the plan is to use a file share server to host these documents then please refer the below docs, where we can configure Appian to use a different path (Local drive/network drive/ file share server path) to host the collab files. 
 If you follow this approach, you might have to copy the entire accdocs1, accdocs2 and accdocs3 folder with its sub folders and files into the new server and Appian will continue to work normally. 
 
 I hope by this way there is no need to move the files to the central location via FTP/SFTP. 
 
 Thanks, Raghu