I haven't followed all of the details in this thread, so apologies if I'm off the mark. (Not that following threads keeps me from wandering out into left field anyway.) First off, I'm glad that DvR was able to restore from a VM.
I had a 4D V13 database that was going to store *lots* of scanned documents. I didn't want to keep them in the data file directly as it would become kind of pointlessly massive. I looked at the options, tried things out...and came away a bit worried about the outside-of-data-file story. Here's what we did, and it seems to be working fine: * Store the BLOBs (PDFs) outside of the data file using 4D's automatic feature. * Use a custom method to periodically (nightly, in our case) scan through the documents and export them by hand to a different location. So, as a backup to the 4D system, we've got an independent export of all of the documents organized in a hierarchical file system. Could we recover from a disaster this way? Yeah, but it would take some work. The folder names are based on the parent record IDs. Documents belong to something - the folder identifies 'something'. So, with a bunch of folder-doc walking, we could re-import all of the raw documents, but that doesn't get you any associated data about the document, if you have any. (You could write that out to a file next to the document, for what it's worth.) I know that all sounds kind of over the top, but it delivers these benefits: * A bit of peace of mind regarding a feature that, at the time, was new and not well field tested. (And, in retrospect, it sounds like our concerns weren't entirely unfounded.) * A snapshot backup that could itself be backed up with standard OS-level backup tools. * A hierarchical folder structure that can be drag-and-dropped onto a remote volume or served directly as a set of Web files. That last one actually was important for us. The same system is used in a few databases. In one, the documents are associated with people and need to be reviewed by various people. Once they get past an existing SSO, they can review the people. It's not that hard to spit out a page for each person. Since we've got a /personID/123.pdf sort of naming system, the Web page can reference the documents using src="123.pdf", which is so, so easy to deal with. Anyway, that's all kind of specific and has very little to do with the original problem (glad it was solved already!), but it worked out pretty well in this situation for not much work at all. ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
