How the heck do I import a bunch of files? Nothing works...

[jhuie]

Ok, I am just learning Alfresco and have been fighting to import a bunch of directories of files into it.  I have a couple megabytes of Word, Excel, etc. files.  I tried CIFS copying and it eventually dies due to a known bug which appears to have no fix.

See: http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=938&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

So I used FTP which works for a while until it dies due to a known issue with memory cleanup issues.

See: http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20273&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=15

So I zipped them up and did an import which appears to work for a moment before kicking out about a gazillion errors that I haven't even started trying to track down yet.  Should I give up or is this worth pursuing?

I am using Alfresco Community 3.2 on a Windows 2003 server.  I've got loads of memory and storage space.  Everything works fine for small amounts of data but when I do the bulk load it bombs out.  It's not giving me much confidence in the stability/scalability.  Am I just missing something here?

Thanks!

[jhuie]

Sorry, I just realized I had the wrong link in there for the first one.  It should have been:

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=20617

Has anyone successfully bulk loaded files into Alfresco lately?  It sure seems like my options are slim at this point and I could sure use some pointers.  Thank you!

John

[tara_b]

Hi,

I've just done a data migration into Alfresco of about 4G worth of documents.  I agree that loading through CIFS and WebDav is slow, but if you do it on the server rather than on a client machine, it might be ok. I found the fastest way was to zip a number of files, copy the .zip over through CIFS, then unzip it on the CIFS drive.

I have also used ACPs (Alfresco Content Packages) to load documents that had metadata associated with it (the metadata was stored in an Excel file). ACPs are just like zip files, although I dont think they are compressed. You can load them through the Admin console > Import. They are also what you get if you do Admin console > Export.  There is a wiki page on this if you search for "ACP".  What we did was write a custom Java app that would create the acp and an xml with all of the metadata attached. Then when we loaded it into Alfresco, we got all the documents pre-populated with metadata.

[groutal]

What you can use is an ETL tool. There are open source tools available for free.
Talend Open Studio is an open source ETL tool for data integration and migration experts. It's easy to learn for a non-technical user.

What distinguishes Talend, when it comes to business users, is the tMap component. It allows the user to get a graphical and functional view of integration processes. For more information: http://www.talend.com/