Loomio
Tue 30 Jan 2018 7:18PM

Uploaded file duplication on loomio servers, storage quotas.

JR John Rhoads Public Seen by 87

I have been occasionally uploading identical files to my Loomio thread contexts and to certain comments due to my organizing strategies relevant to subjects. I'm worried that identical files are being uploaded to the Loomio servers and taking up more storage space than desired. Does Loomio account for this by only storing one copy of the file and referencing it each time it is uploaded to different places (i.e. thread context and comments)? If not, does Loomio have any plan to have some form of "de-duplication"?

JR

John Rhoads Tue 30 Jan 2018 7:24PM

Perhaps this thread should have been started in Loomio Community - Product Development

JK

James Kiesel Tue 30 Jan 2018 7:24PM

We don't determine if a file is the same as an existing file when it's uploaded, and in fact it would get very expensive and potentially error-prone to do so. Disk space is pretty cheap these days, and at least on Loomio.org, the uploads are hosted in the cloud (with Amazon S3), so it's not too much trouble to carry multiple copies of the same file – the cloud has space for em.

JK

James Kiesel Tue 30 Jan 2018 9:17PM

One option here, if you had lots of large duplicates and were concerned about storage space on your own instance, for example, would be to link directly to the existing uploaded file. If you visit the uploaded file directly (for example by clicking on it and selecting 'open in new tab'), you can use that URL to enter into the 'Link to websites and online resources', and Loomio will handle displaying that file correctly without making a duplicate upload (you also have the advantage of not needing to wait for that file to upload again with this approach)