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Running out of Disk space

aswini
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi All,

I am trying to deploy Alfresco to our company. Recently I discovered that Alfresco takes up enormous space to store the versions of documents. Alfresco seems to store every version of the document as a separate physical file instead of just the changes. This means that soon the disk space will be completely full.

Any ideas if there's an alternative for this. And if so, how to implement please. - How do I store only the changes of the documents as versions (ideally MS Word/MS Excel)??

Thank you

Regds
Aswini
6 REPLIES 6

mikeh
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
Any ideas if there's an alternative for this. And if so, how to implement please. - How do I store only the changes of the documents as versions (ideally MS Word/MS Excel)??
Storing deltas for binary file formats is unfeasible really. Also, I'm reasonably sure Microsoft Office doesn't support anything like this natively.

Mike

Not applicable
Huuuum I'm not so sure about that. I worked as a student for 6 months on delta differencing…We found something very interesting and quite advanced, proposed by Google, called "open vcdiff" (written in C++):
http://code.google.com/p/open-vcdiff/

as its name suggests, it's based on the vcdiff RFC (RFC 3284 for those who want to know):
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3284.html

We made a little API my partner and I, in C#. It wasn't very hard, although it was only school work (not stronger enough for production and in pre-alpha version should i say Smiley Very Happy). I think an implementation in Java would be nice Smiley Happy

Plus, if I remember, SVN is based on xDelta (not very sure about that) which is also a delta-differencing software?

Maybe an integration of such a thing would be a great idea Smiley Very Happy

Not the good post to speak about that by the way ^^ What do you think of it Mike?

mikeh
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
Not something on our roadmap as disk space is far cheaper than development effort, but would make a nice contribution!

Thanks,
Mike

Not applicable
I didn't think of it from that angle, but I must admit that I agree Smiley Very Happy
For the contribution, I'll try to motivate my ex-partner and see if we can do something about it…Meanwhile, if anybody is interested, the idea is raised ^^

aswini
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
So does that mean, document versioning will duplicate a file even if small changes are done (lets say for a 5MB file, making it 10MB for 2 versions)??  And that there isnt any option [yet] to store the changes alone for a document?

Regards
Aswini

zaizi
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
As the previous post mentions, to store differences only, you need to know specifics for each document format types.

Typically in implementations with versioning, just set up a custom rule to delete,
1. Versions older than specific value
2. All minor versions

This can be configured as per your specific business processes / requirements.