File Manager-file organization keeps changing

Now I understand what you mean by well-intentioned change to save space!

So it sounds like my file links also came with the meta information links to the master copies. Because you say the procedure was to "force the system to delete the links and create [our] own copies", does this now mean that our club as an exception has actual copies, or are they still links?

I needed to verify that it could be fixed on a per club basis... thanks for your help on that.

I just completed doing the global fix. I had to ditch all the relevant links in every club's file uploads folder and replace those with actual meta information files. There will be clubs that will be ticked off because I touched their files, but hopefully you can understand why I had to do that given what you ran into.

This way of storing information in files about other files is a very old "hacky" part of the system that goes back many years... I have been wanting to replace it with a better way involving the system database, but have not gotten to it yet.

Here is a screen capture from my FTP tool for your file uploads folder on the server--some of the files were cut off at the bottom. The links at the top that show as "File Folders" are actually the links to the common files... They are not folders... I think that is a bug in the FTP tool I use. I know that because if I double click on the link, the appropriate file is downloaded, not a folder.

If you look closely, you can see the extra files that are used for tracking public/members only and the file descriptions/virtual folders. Those use to be links... that is what I changed just now for every club in the system. Again, I am not too keen on this way of storing file info... I hope to find some time to change it.

If you use the above as a guide, and consider the 11,000+ clubs in the system, you can probably understand why we may just want to provide links to common files rather than the actual files themselves. If you look at the Pathways file or the app file... in some cases we may be talking gigabytes of space taken up by duplicate files on the server.

Perhaps this is something I can put into the file manager tools in the future. e.g., allow clubs to reference a common file without having to upload it. I think that could be a win for everyone involved.

You're welcome -- I tend to have a knack for revealing tricky problems!

So, if I understand it correctly, what is stored for each club is not the pdf itself, but a file with meta information and that points to the repository's pdf, and this is still the case for my club, but the procedure that I performed is new and now the file structure won't keep changing (but it would keep changing for other clubs for now). Is that correct?

I'm assuming that if a club were to delete one of those stock files and later decides to add it back in from a local drive, then it would be treated as the club's own file and not a stock file. In this case, it would take up that storage space again (and the procedure I did would not need to be performed for that file).

sort of... there are up to 3 files stored for each file you upload. 1 is the actual file, and the maybe other 2 contain the meta information.

Normally, you would have actual files for each stored in your folder, but for the case of "stock" files, we want to link to the master file and just store the your own copies of the files containing the meta info so that you can control the descriptions and public status independently of other clubs.

In any case, yes you should be good to go and not need to do any kinds of further "fix procedures".

I am going to close this thread now. Let us know if you run into anything else.