unreferenced files in vault

[MikeLockwood]

New for Windchill 10.x (PTC posted today) is a WINDU task that counts the unrefrerenced files and reports by vault folder. Turns out we have almost 1/2 million of them.

We've never run the Delete Unreferenced Files command (after being live for almost 6 years). Mostly this is because a) there is nothing that forces one to do so b) we've seen various posts over time that the system sometimes gets a bit aggressive and deletes the wrong files, so we're gun-shy.

It makes perfect sense that if you for example create a document with a file and then delete it, that file remains. But what could we have possibly done to have 1/2 million unreferenced files? Note: They are spread about evenly thru all ~ 70 of the vault folders that we have, so it's not tied to any one or two actions.

thanks in advance for any insight

[SteveVinyard]

clone your system to a test server and test it out there first. Validate and it should be fine.

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Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

[sdrzewiczewski]

The biggest cause of these files are users that upload work to their server side workspace before they check in. We have the preference set that Pro/E uploads on save.

Say a user creates a new cad part and saves, this writes to the server side workspace, a new object is in the vault.
The new cad part is still not checked in.
The user opens it again, makes some changes saves it, this writes to the server side workspace, another new object is in the vault,
This is repeated again and again.

Hope this helps,
Steve D.

[VenkataKotra]

Hi Mike,

Surprised to hear that in last 6 years you've never had to execute unreferenced files..
Yes in Windchill 9.1 earlier releases there was an issue with unreferenced files and PTC released a patch later to fix this issue.

We always do this every quarter of the year..it's one of the best practices Windchill admins have to follow.
In 6 years there can be many changes to your cad data and non-cad data and it's possible to get so many unreferenced files..

Just checking the count is not sufficient..please try to execute on each vault (master/replica vault) with an option of move instead of delete on test server if you've
enough disk space on vault..Then you will be able to know is the count real or not and also unreferenced files functionality is working or not..

Hope you are executing 'revaulting' function time to time to get rid of data from oracle blobs and to move to vaults for better performance and also to reduce oracle data size.

regards
Venkata Kotra║Sr.Analyst, Engg Systems ║IS, HHI
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