Migrating documents out of Appian to external file system

Question

What is the easiest/most efficient way to move a large number (1 million+) of documents currently stored in Appian to an external file system? Is there a way to get the accDocs path from an Appian documentId or would it be best to create an Appian process and use the move to Filesystem smart service or do it some other way? Preferably we would like to also keep the metadata associated with the files (although we could extract that from Appian separately prior to migration if needed) I'm curious if anyone else has done this and if there any other concerns or risks we should be aware of? Thanks!

Colton Beck · Answer

I've had success in the past sending documents out of Appian via process using the SFTP plugin. With respect to keeping the metadata intact, that is more difficult. One option is to rename the files to include some identifier that you could use to re-associate the documents with the metadata once they're migrated. 
 
You may be able to ask Appian Support to help you with migrating documents, but I'm not sure what options they may have on their end.

aloks0189 · Answer

Hi wendys42 Also you can have a look into, Content Management tool such as Alfresco which is pretty popular for managing the documents, and it's document link url we can associate in Appian for future purpose.

wendys42 · Answer

Thanks! I did get some other information from support on how to move the files to a different directory, and by using the function "getcontentobjectdetailsbyid()" (part of the Content Details by UUID smart service) we can get the file location and other metadata by doc ID. This gives us what we needed for our use case.