import the existing content or other suggestion???

[desipan]

I have Alfresco installed and now I am trying to figure out the way to use/share my existing files (mostly PDF & MS Words documents, approximately 75GB) on my USB external NTFS drive. Since I do not have that much space on my internal HD, I want to keep using the existing USB external drive.
I know I have a option of using the IMPORT feature, but this feature will store all the contents on my internal HD. And I do not want to store the imported content on the internal HD, because of not having enough space. Is there any way to change the location of the content storage (repository) and point it to the external drive?
Or is there any other way to start using the existing content from that external drive without using the IMPORT feature?
I appreciate your help on this issue.

[pmonks]

Alfresco stores files in a "mangled" format on disk, so while you can configure Alfresco to use any disk storage device connected to your computer, it won't simply "inherit" the content that's already there and automatically expose it via the repository.  In fact some aspects of the file (including its name, the space it's located in, permissions, metadata etc.) are stored in a relational database, so content has to be explicitly ingested in order to be fully registered.

If your USB drive has at least 75GB of free space, I'd suggest configuring Alfresco to use the USB drive for the contentstore, then simply copy in the 75GB of files via one of the virtual file servers (FTP, CIFS, WebDAV, etc.).  Once the files are imported into your repository and you have a tested backup plan in place (see http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore), you can delete the original files off the USB drive and use the versions in Alfresco exclusively.

If you don't have 75GB of free space on at least one of the drives attached to the system, you'll need to find some way to obtain that much free space (eg. free up some disk space, attach further storage to the system, etc.), or else you'll have to "trickle" files into the repository in small batches, ensuring the system doesn't run out of disk space.

Cheers,
Peter