We are trying to clean up unnecessary documents in our Appian instance. We would like a way to do this process but also have a way to recover the files that we delete if we need to roll back. Is there a process we can go through to backup Appian documents on the backend? We are on-premise. I am concerned that when they are deleted on the front end, then the metadata will be gone from the meta-database and they cannot just be put back in the backend folder system.
Thanks
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You have an interesting use case. Would you mind giving more details?
I do not know of a official way to recover the metadata of documents. Did you try to contact Appian?
Hi Stefan
We have discovered that we are generating extra documents in our production environment that we do not need to store. We have since fixed the issue, but would like to clear out the extra documents as they are taking up disk space. We are looking to develop a rollback procedure if our process for finding and deleting these extra documents is un-successful.
So, these documents are not used anywhere in an application? This means, you did not store the ID anywhere. Then the ID does not matter and you could just upload the document again. This means that you could just delete these files including the metadata. Once you find out that you need one of them, just upload it to Appian.
Unfortunately the scale of this document deletion is too large to do any kind of manual uploading. Additionally, the application created the documents, so the only version of them that we have is what is stored in Appian.
Why you don't use an external system like an FTP / SFTP server to store those documents before you delete them.
You can use this plugin https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/sftp-smart-services which contains all the smart services you need to automatically upload, download or delete a file from the server.