Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

1080.0. "Archiving large files in shared directories" by BREAKR::MIKKELSON (Kill me. I need the money.) Mon Jul 20 1992 18:32

I need some advice about what approach to recommend to a customer.  I hope I
can explain what they need without its coming out too convoluted:

Some of their users pull foreign files ("foreign" being defined as formats
not generally recognized by ALL-IN-1, such as Interleaf, Microsoft Word, etc.)
off their PCs, then attach those documents to ALL-IN-1 mail messages and send 
them to other users.  Unfortunately, many of these foreign files are quite 
large (some are 100,000+ blocks!), and they're taking up a lot of disk space 
in the ALL-IN-1 shared directories.  The customer wants to archive these files 
while maintaining the ability to restore them if requested.  I'm looking for 
suggestions about how to best accomplish this.

One obvious solution is to use the ALL-IN-1 archiving facility.  I'm not sure
if that is necessarily the best approach, though.  We ultimately want to 
archive all files in the shared directories that have an .FGN extension and
were created before a certain date.  I haven't really used ALL-IN-1's archiving
facility before, but it doesn't appear that there would be an easy way to 
archive only the files we wanted without writing some sort of procedure that
laboriously worked its way through every single user's file cabinet, searching
for foreign documents, messages, and attachments.  Additionally, I'm not sure
that the customer wants to archive whole messages, just whatever foreign
attachments they may have.

The idea we've been kicking around is to just copy all the .FGN files out of
the shared directories to some archive area (tape or optical disc or 
something), then replace them with empty files (in order to prevent ALL-IN-1's
housekeeping procedures from zapping file cabinet entries because their
corresponding files aren't found).  The problem with this approach is how to
best let users know that some of their attachments have been archived.  There
really isn't an easy way to determine which users are referencing a particular
file in a shared directory and notify them directly.  We can't replace the
.FGN files with a message saying something like "Call the ALL-IN-1 Manager to
restore this file", because the users can't read foreign messages from 
ALL-IN-1, and we have no easy way of knowing which type of file (Interleaf,
Microsoft Word, etc.) we're replacing.  The users would just end up sending
the attachments down to their PCs, then finding them empty when they tried to
read them, and not necessarily realizing that they had been archived.  We can't
change any of the attributes of the attachments so that they could be replaced
by the aforementioned text message, because all the attributes are stored in 
the system DAFs.  

So, any ideas about how to proceed, assuming I made the explanation 
understandable?

- David